Unrequited Love And Quotes & Sayings

What, Kilorn?' I sigh.

'What,' he echoes, shaking his head. After a long second, something snaps in him. 'I know you don't feel the same way I do. About us.'

I'm seized by the urge to smash my head against a rock. Us. It feels stupid to talk about, a foolish waste of time and energy. But more than that, it's embarrassing and uncomfortable. My cheeks flame red. This is not a conversation I ever wanted to have with him. — Victoria Aveyard

What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I watched as Humphrey Bogart's character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman's character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn't. I didn't care. I had enough problems of my own. — Graeme Simsion

By the Angel, Bridget's depressing," said Henry, setting down his newspaper directly on his plate and causing the edge to soak through with egg yolk. Charlotte opened her mouth as if to object, and closed it again. "It's all heartbreak, death and unrequited love."
"Well, that is what most songs are about," said Will. "Requited love is nice, but it doesn't make much of a ballad. — Cassandra Clare

I'm coming back into focus when Caesar asks him if he has a girlfriend back home. Peeta hesitates, then gives an unconvincing shake of his head.
Handsome lad like you. There must be some special girl. Come on, what's her name?" says Caesar.
Peeta sighs. "Well, there is this one girl. I've had a crush on her ever since I can remember. But I'm pretty sure she didn't know I was alive until the reaping."
Sounds of sympathy from the crowd. Unrequited love they can relate to.
She have another fellow?" asks Caesar.
I don't know, but a lot of boys like her," says Peeta.
So, here's what you do. You win, you go home. She can't turn you down then, eh?" says Caesar encouragingly.
I don't think it's going to work out. Winning ... won't help in my case," says Peeta.
Why ever not?" says Caesar, mystified.
Peeta blushes beet red and stammers out. "Because ... because ... she came here with me. — Suzanne Collins

I never thought people actually woke up the way I did that morning. I always figured it was hyperbole and massive overcompensation to say that you woke up grinning, woke up in a state of contentment and excitement for the smallest things. Even while I was in love formerly, it seemed more like a comfortable thing rather than a giddy, overwhelming happiness. Realize, then, that I had never been joined in a mutual state of infatuation with someone else. My infatuations tended to be unrequited, accompanied by a sense of muted sadness. I sat up at 7:00a.m. without even waiting for the alarm, and kept still there, smiling, looking at nothing and going over yesterday's conversations, the fevered symphony of emotion ringing forever in my ears.
I fell back and actually laughed to myself, reaching for my glasses to slide them on as I stretched out my back comfortably in a lazy, half-waking state.
You are in love. — Vee Hoffman

Eventually, I spent so much time in the friend zone
that I grew to think of it as some kind
of magical home away from home, some lush forest
filled with unicorns and elves and puppies
none of whom were getting laid. — Dylan Garity

He slowed to a walk. As he approached her he was surprised at just how pretty she was. She looked a little like Maureen O'Hara in those old pirate movies. His writer's mind kicked in and he thought, This woman could break my heart. I could crash and burn on this woman. I could lose this woman, drink heavily, write profound poems, and die in the gutter of turberculosis over this woman.
This was not an unusual reaction for Tommy. He had it often, mostly with girls who worked the drive-through windows at fast-food places. He would drive off with the smell of fries in his car and the bitter taste of unrequited love on his tongue. It was usually good for at least one short story. — Christopher Moore

Guys are totally stupid when it comes to unrequited love. We females pine away and keep our thighs closed for the most part when we love someone we can't have. Guys swing their shit around at anything that has a hole, trying to forget the one they want. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

February 2009
January 4. January 4. January 4. I rubbed the paper on my red calendar. I cried into the little box, into the last day we had sex.
I was a tornado. I puked hurricanes.
I was Jodi Arias. There were no more tears for him.
Swirling eddies of vodka, pills, fattening food, and tears. Vortexes corralled other vortexes. They joined forces with the eyes of other storms far out into the Gulf, and Atlantic, and castrated my heart first, then everything below the neck. Fuck the heart; my brain was mauled into mush. He didn't have a heart - and possibly, neither did I. The heart had nothing to do with a whirlpool of circles and left and rights I navigated. — Christy Heron

I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool. — Patrick Rothfuss

Relationships are like walls painted off-white and every time you'll hurt me, it will be like resting dirty shoes on them, like bashing holes in the walls, one after the other. And then there will come a day, where the walls will be filled with so many holes, that there wouldn't be any place left for you to place the tiniest kiss. Only then will I walk away for good. — Malak El Halabi

She had a destiny, and it was wonderful, every girl's dream. Like Sleeping Beauty, awoken from a deep sleep by a charming vampire, Lena would have her very own fairy tale. — Amber Belldene

Anna and I did not make love. I don't remember why. Maybe we didn't need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She'd been a midwife before she opened a studio; she'd held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy. — Norman Lock

And her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back. — Janette Rallison

With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk. — Sarah Waters

You love him because this is what you do. Over and over again. You knit yourself right up into these men's lives, these men who will never ever be able to love you back, and then you wonder like a crazy person why you aren't the chosen one at the end. You have to stop doing this ... — Collier Lumpkin

I'm a critic. I write essays about works of art. It's like being a eunuch in the seraglio, but unrequited love is the sweetest, and I have the proper distance. I can compress the qualities of beauty I've been trained to see, store them up, and bring them out at will, rapid-fire, in the combinations I want. — Mark Helprin

My heart! Ohhh my poor heart
Its bruised...its scarred and its full of pain.... But its still in love with you! — Kiran Joshi

I was only trying to survive, she mumbled, as if it made any difference. It was no excuse to use against someone who had truly been trying to survive, and Damian had done so quite successfully since 1450. What right had she to say that it was hard? — Elaine White

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband - I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid - I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny - I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea - I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent. — Walt Whitman

I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart. — Djuna Barnes

I was too busy writing sad ballads to unrequited love in my head and planning a life where my hand would be my boyfriend. — T.J. Klune

This is agony cried Mr Salteena clutching hold of a table my life will be sour grapes and ashes without you. — Daisy Ashford

Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right? Canada spends all of its time thinking about the United States, obsessing over the United States. It's unrequited love between Canada and the United States. — Tucker Carlson

Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured. — Jeanne Safer

Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back ... then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else. — Sarah Cross

The PBA was a symptom of the Philippines' basketball obsession, not the cause. I was thrilled to be witnessing the professional game from inside Alaska's locker room, but that wasn't what brought me to Manila in the first place. I was inspired by the idea that a Southeast Asian nation populated by five-foot-five men and mostly forgotten by America except for its political corruption, widespread prostitution, and violent Muslim separatist movement could be devoted to hoops with a passion unequaled by any other country. It was a nationwide tale of unrequited love. Forty million short men obsessed with basketball--they might as well have been a nation of blind art historians. — Rafe Bartholomew

The world shrinks to include only two people, only one of whom -- the beloved -- has power. This inequitable distribution naturally breeds resentment and feelings of hopelessness that the dependent person dare not express for fear of alienating the necessary person even more. — Jeanne Safer

Her kiss was a good-bye and a promise and a dream. — Shannon A. Thompson

Winter is much like unrequited love; cold and merciless. — Kellie Elmore

I'd rather be not the light in your life
The bright day might make me obscure
I'd rather be the cold darkness
For it remains, unseen, uncertain and unsure — Sanhita Baruah

The unspoken feeling that engulfs you and smolders you more and more each day.....love! — Kiran Joshi

Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn't have. Maybe there's a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again. — Carol Rifka Brunt

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy
even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery. — Jean Rhys

He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax ... — Bohumil Hrabal

The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep. — Walt Whitman

How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen! — Charles Dickens

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake. — Ben Elton

Do you ever get the feeling that when you show someone your affection for them, you are assaulting them? Like you should probably leave them alone? Your affection, no matter how sincere, does not necessarily mean a damn thing to the person you are giving it to. Love can corner you. When you intrude on someone with your affection, you might find yourself trying to knock a strong door down with your shoulder. Either you break the door or you break yourself. Something almost always gets broken. In my mind it runs like this:
I'm going to like you, whether you like it or not. I'll wear you down until you relent and swallow this big lie I have for you. Don't move. Don't live. I love you. — Henry Rollins

A singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn't her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers.
Kestrel looked away from Arin.
She swore to herself that she would never look back — Marie Rutkoski

The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands. — Beth Kephart

And yes even loved him even though logic and reason told me I had no business feeling that way about him but I didn't care, no I loved him, and wanted him to know it not because I expected him to reciprocate )and yes even loved him even though logic and reason told me I had no business feeling that way about him but I didn't care, no I(even though I really really wanted him to) but because if someone ever loved me in that pure way I would want to know about it — Megan McCafferty

But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys. — J.M. Barrie

Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don't you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest that for a girl in your-your ambiguous position, you are too proud, by several shades. Don't go back to Roger in a hurry! You're not the unspotted maiden you were but two short days ago. Who am I, what am I, to the people whose opinion you care for? A very low fellow, madam; and yet with me you've gone far to cast your lot. If you're not prepared to do more, you should have done less.
Nora, Nora," he went on, breaking into a vein none the less revolting for being more ardent, "I confess I don't understand you! But the more you puzzle me the more you fascinate me; and the less you like me the more I love you. What has there been between you and Lawrence? Hang me if I can understand! Are you an angel of purity, or are you the most audacious of flirts? — Henry James

In the morning, that moment, when I knew it was you. When I could feel you breathing and we opened our eyes at the exact same time. — Kate Chisman

I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half. — Jan Ellison

I think of the quietness of Julian's voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.
I love you, Julian. But the words don't come. — Lauren Oliver

Will you stay here? No. Will you go back? You can't. We must, therefore, go on. That's is our only hope.
Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it.
Poverty, sicknes, and death are evils; but the worst of all evils is unrequited love. — James De Mille

In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We ARE that meaning. "And what we see, "says the poet Mary Oliver, "is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish." As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself. We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night, I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to, "I love you and I miss you: come home safe." Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn't it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes ... — Carl Safina

I shall never love any as I love thee, Moonbrow!" she cried.
He nuzzled her, very gently. "Nor I you, Ryhenna," he said. "Tek is my mate. I love her. You are my shoulder-friend, and I love you. I love you both, but differently. And when in a year or two years' time, you dance court within this glade, it will be with one whom you love in a way entirely other than the way that you love me. I am your companion, your friend, Ryhenna, just as you are always and ever mine. Stand fast with me," he said, "and no foe shall ever part us. — Meredith Ann Pierce

She seemed dressed in all of me, stretched across my shame.
All the torment and the pain leaked through and covered me.
I'd do anything to have her to myself.
Just to have her for myself
Now I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do when she makes me sane.
She is everything to me.
The unrequited dream
A song that no one sings.
The unattainable, Shes a myth that I have to believe in
All I need to make it real is one more reason
I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do when she makes me sad. — Slipknot

If I wanted to be free of this unrequited longing, I would have to make peace with the past and finally let go. There was no way around it. But did I want to be free of it - and him? — Kat Von D.

Amid the worry of a self- condemnatory soliloquy, his demeanour seemed grave, perhaps cold, both to me and his mother. And yet there was no bad feeling, no malice, no rancour, no littleness in his countenance, beautiful with a man's best beauty, even in its depression. When I placed his chair at the table, which I hastened to do, anticipating the servant, and when I handed him his tea, which I did with trembling care, he said: "Thank you, Lucy," in as kindly a tone of his full pleasant voice as ever my ear welcomed. — Charlotte Bronte

The mysteries I desired to learn of heaven and earth and all that is between could only be taught by experiencing you. — Truth Devour

I suppose that unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get ahold of the other half. — Jan Ellison

Everything was Amelia's fault. He hadn't done anything wrong and neither had Kaitlin, but they were the ones paying the price and for what? To bring back a girl that he hated and wished he could kill but couldn't? To bring back a girl who had broken her mother's heart to such an extent that it killed her? As far as Damian was concerned, it wasn't worth it. She didn't deserve to come back; she didn't deserve to live. No, Amelia deserved nothing, and especially not his love. — Elaine White

All I have ever wanted, needed, dreamed and desired is contained within you. — Truth Devour

Your dress is thin, you have been dancing, you are heated." "Always preaching," retorted she; "always coddling and admonishing." The answer Dr. John would have given did not come; that his heart was hurt became evident in his eye; darkened, and saddened, and pained, he turned a little aside, but was patient. — Charlotte Bronte

I remembered Daemon's feather soft kisses on my cheek, and I remembered the clouds parting and the sun shining on a cold February day in Ireland. And as my baby girl was laid on my chest and my husband held my hand, I saw my best friend Kat walk into the sun kissed part in the clouds, hand in hand, along with the last regrets of my past. — Rebecca Boucher

Love is a rare and precious thing. Squander it at your peril. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

Not a day or an hour and sometimes not even a moment in advance did I have any idea what Patrick had in mind for me, or whether he had me in mind at all. This uncertainty lay like a sore under the surface of my skin, erupting again and again, then subsiding, but never healing. — Jan Ellison

Had Martha Foley returned William [James Sidis]'s passion as Margaret [Engemann] did Norbert [Wiener]'s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common in the long run. ... In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life, a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert's response to their childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded. A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives. — Amy Wallace

And said with the softness of repressed violence, 'I am not one to stick his neck out; it is a bit of a reach. I was waiting for the smallest sign that you could love me ... I never got it.'
Laertes, Count of Samothrace — Rebecca Ashe

A mighty pain to love it is,
And 't is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain. — Abraham Cowley

The world is full of unrequited love,' I said finally.
'You and Patrick having problems?' Dad said, reaching around to get the butter out of the fridge.
'No, I was just wondering what you would say if I was a lesbian.'
'Come again?' said Lester. 'I'm having a hard time following this conversation. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Which is worse? Loving someone and not being able to be with them or not loving someone and having to be with them. — Donna Lynn Hope

There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms. — Laini Taylor

The problem with me is that I cannot focus when she is on my mind. I can't. I probably will make a mistake when writing that paper and will start writing everything I feel about her - the professor will be very happy with that, I am sure. Oh well, such is my life. I guess I've been attempting my best to forget her for several weeks now. But even in that act of forgetting her, I am remembering her. I am recollecting her and recreating her in my mind. And that's where everything falls apart. In remembering her, I remember her goodness. In remembering her, I remember her weaknesses and my own. In remembering her, I am remembering myself. Out of that dark cave of mine, I call myself out. And then all of the remembering starts again. I doodle, I twitch, I aim restlessly for some unseen goal. And then my thoughts drift to you.
I'll let them stay there for now. Just for a minute.
Or two. — Moses Y. Mikheyev

Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night. — Sybil Adelman

Garrett has been the best friend a girl could want, so how could I be so stupid as to think about shutting him out for good? I've been so busy thinking about my unrequited love, I haven't even stopped to consider the other, more important part of our relationship.
Friendship.
Ignoring him now would make him think I don't care, that I don't want to be friends. I want to get over him, not lose him for good! How must he feel, with me not replying to his texts and e-mails like this? What kind of friend am I? — Abby McDonald

I loved you even when you forgot me.
And - for a little while - you loved me back. — Julio Alexi Genao

And I had loved her, I had at least once in my life been capable of that, able to escape my self long enough to love. Suddenly, the unacknowledged sorrows and blunders of my life surged up in me all at once. I thought I would be sick. I gasped, put my hand over my mouth until tears began collecting on my fingers. I took my hand away and looked at it as if I had just discovered I was bleeding. — Wayne Johnston

I stand, and wait among the sea foam. I swim in my own tears-I sing without my voice. I do not reach for higher ground, because I have lapped in the churning waters. — Meredith T. Taylor

It's all heartbreak, death, and unrequited love." "Well, that is what most songs are about," said Will. "Requited love is ideal but doesn't make much of a ballad — Cassandra Clare

What does agonizical mean?" she asks. I hold up my hands like it's obvious. "To be consumed with shock and denial at unrequited love from the man who is supposed to be your soul mate, — Katie Kacvinsky

That it's no good loving me because I'm never going to get married anyway and he'd just end up hating me later instead of sooner. — Suzanne Collins

I watched you try on suits in Hugo Boss.'For the big job,' you said. And I laughed, because I knew I would never see it. I'd never get up and watch you put it on and walk out of the door. I would never be the one that you came home to. — Kate Chisman

It's crazy, that the defining moment of your life can be nothing to someone else. Like an infatuation, an unrequited love, every bit of you is drawn to it, orbits that heaviness at the center of your universe, everything you think and feel revolving around it and yet, nobody knows. Even the one who caused it. Especially the one who caused it. — Leah Raeder

She was so fed up with unrequited love and platonic love and all the other kinds of love that weren't passionate, romantic, can't-live-without-you, I-have-to-have-you-right-now, the-beat-of-your-heart-matches-the-beat-of-mine love. — Sarra Manning

Why weren't we born in the same era?" he lamented. She eased past him neither here nor there, looked over her shoulder and whispered, "How mundane and cliche would that be? — Donna Lynn Hope

Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate. — Margaret Mitchell

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever. — Sylvia Plath

I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands. — Francesca Lia Block

The first time I read Gone with the Wind and Rhett walked out on Scarlett, I was fifteen and thought all that unrequited love was wildly romantic. The second time I read it, last summer, I thought she was silly and he was a selfish pig. — Jodi Picoult

My heart is not brave or big. It is not cruel either. It is not strong at all. I keep it within this iron cage for a reason. Breathe on it wrong and I will die ... Just go now. I would rather let you see my face, than my heart.'
Laertes, Count of Samothrace — Rebecca Ashe

What do you want from me, Snow?"
"Nothing," he says. And he means it, the actual bastard. — Rainbow Rowell

All that existed was the blinding imperative to not think, to leave it all behind. To have it all fade to black in the throes of a truly good orgasm. To thrust and rock and pound until he came long and hard. To reach the pinnacle as fast as he could, to leap off the edge and truly leave all his earth-bound worries behind.
He was a cave man.
He was a Neanderthal.
He was fucking Cro-Magnon. — Amy Andrews

Special. Cute. Friends. He wished she'd just cut his testicles off and be done with it already. Depending on the next adjective she chose for him, he would either qualify as a card-carrying member of Emasculated Men's Club or a Muppet. No wonder he avoided love for as long as he had. When it went unrequited, it truly sucked. — Jennifer Shirk

At the ponds that evening I said to Antonio: "It's always been like that, since we were little: everyone thinks she's bad and I'm good."
He kissed me, murmuring ironically, "Why, isn't that true?"
That response touched me and kept me from telling him that we had to part. It was a decision that seemed to me urgent, the affection wasn't love, I loved Nino, I knew I would love him forever. I had a gentle speech prepared for Antonio, I wanted to say to him: It's been wonderful, you helped me a lot at a time when I was sad, but now school is starting and this year is going to be difficult, I have new subjects, I'll have to study a lot; I'm sorry but we have to stop. I felt it was necessary and every afternoon I went to our meeting at the ponds with my little speech ready. But he was so affectionate, so passionate, that my courage failed and I put it off. — Elena Ferrante

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. — Olivia Sudjic

Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously. — Cassandra Clare

The thing about me loving Harry is I'm twelve and he's maybe thirty or thirty-five, whatever, so he'll have to wait like six years for me to grow up. I mean if he kills Hiskott and sets us free, he'll have to wait. He'll never do that. As kind and sweet and brave as he is, he probably has a girl already a hundred others chasing after him. So what I'll have to do is always love him from afar. Unrequited love. That's what they generally call it. I'll love him forever in a deeply, deeply sad kind of way, which maybe you think sounds pretty depressing, but it isn't. Being obsessed about a deeply sad unrequited love can take your mind off the worse things, of which there are thousands, and sometimes it's better to dwell endlessly on what you can't have than on what might happen to you at any moment in Harmony corner. — Dean Koontz

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock. — Donna Tartt

Since I met you, I feel like I can see the operating system of the world- and it is unrequited love. That is why everyone's doing everything. Every book, opera house, moon shot and manifesto is here because someone, somewhere, lit up silent when someone else came into the room, and then quietly burned when they didn't notice them. — Caitlin Moran

I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, "I think you're hideous, grotesque; how I loathe you!"_ — Marcel Proust

He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited. — Anthony Powell

His eyes danced like a teenager. "Eat anyone alive today?" her father joked.
Ruby returned his wicked grin and sauntered into the living room. "Not today, but tomorrow's another day. — Stephanie Greenhalgh

With 'Futurama,' I wanted to do unrequited love, and David Cohen agreed, and although our original plan was never to have Fry and Leela get together, we finally just said, 'You can only string the fans along so far.' — Matt Groening

She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not 'til the day he dies. Not even then. — Daniel Handler