10 romantic lines from literature
It’s time to get sentimental with these lines about love from literature’s greatest authors.
1. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.” – Persuasion by Jane Austen
2. “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.” – Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
3. “Whatever the souls are made of, his and mine are same.” – Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
4. “You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.” – Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
5. “When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No ... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!" – Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
6. “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.” – Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
7. “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
8. "All this gladness in life, all honest pride in doing my work in the world, all this keen sense of being, I owe to her!" And it doubles the gladness, it makes the pride glow, it sharpens the sense of existence till I hardly know if it is pain or pleasure, to think that I owe it to one - nay, you must, you shall hear" - said he, stepping forwards with stern determination - "to one whom I love, as I do not believe man ever loved woman before." – North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
9. “You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me. But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in marriage, you could draw me to any good - every good - with equal force.” – Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
10. “It is better to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.” – Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
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