31 Quotes About Unrequited Love

Having unrequited love is just one part of the bittersweet beauty of life. These quotes about unrequited love will bring you the encouragement you need and hope you deserve.

“A person doesn’t know true hurt and suffering until they’ve felt the pain of falling in love with someone whose affections lie elsewhere.”

“As long as you’re neurotic and crazy, he’s great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.”

“Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?”

“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.”

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

“I realized that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.”

“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.”

“I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.”

“If I said I was madly in love with you you’d know I was lying.”

“If you don’t receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.”

“Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.”

“Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.”

“Love may have the longest arms, but it can still fall short of an embrace.”

“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.”

“Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”

“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.”

“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do.”

“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.”

“Sometimes no matter how many eyelashes or dandelion seeds you blow, no matter how much of your heart you tear out and slap on your sleeve, it just ain’t gonna happen.”

“The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.”

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”

“The saddest thing in the world is loving someone who used to love you.”

“The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”

“There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.”

“There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one’s sentiments.”

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”

“Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.”

“Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.”

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

“When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.”

“You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.”

For many, being attracted to someone or something that is unavailable can help to fuel our ambition and desire.