I’m not going to lie, I’m a sucker for a good love quote. Even though I’m practical most of the time, married with two boys who keep me grounded in reality, there’s something about beautiful love words that just gets me. When my husband sends me a romantic quote out of the blue, it makes my entire day. It reminds me he’s thinking about me, that he sees me, that after all these years, he still wants to make me feel special.
These aren’t just any quotes, though. I’m not interested in generic sayings or those anonymous quotes floating around Pinterest. I wanted the real deal, words from actual authors and poets who knew how to capture what love feels like. So I collected 50 of my absolute favorites, the ones that make my heart skip a beat, the ones that would make any woman feel loved and cherished when she receives them.
Classic Literary Love
These are the quotes from the books I read growing up, the ones my mom had on her bookshelf, the timeless declarations that have survived centuries because they capture something universally true about love. There’s a reason Jane Austen and Dickens are still making us swoon.
- “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.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” – Jane Austen, Persuasion
- “She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was – anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted.” – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
- “I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
- “You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” – Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
- “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
- “Love is a great beautifier.” – Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
- “Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions.” – Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
- “In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you.” – Virginia Woolf
- “You are of such value to me that all else become nought. You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.” – Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company
Poetry That Touches the Soul
Poets have this way of saying in ten words what the rest of us need a hundred to express. These quotes from some of the greatest poets make me understand why poetry has always been the language of love.
- “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight, for I ne’er saw beauty till this night.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
- “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” – Jane Austen, Emma
- “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” – Pablo Neruda
- “You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.” – E.E. Cummings
- “My heart is, and always will be, yours.” – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
- “I wish I had done everything on earth with you.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “He was my North, my South, my East and West.” – W.H. Auden
- “Beauty and Love are as body and soul. Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.” – Rumi
- “If I know what love is, it is because of you.” – Hermann Hesse
- “I’ve tried so many times to think of a new way to say it, and it’s still I love you.” – Zelda Fitzgerald
Modern Authors Who Understand Love
These are from contemporary writers who prove that beautiful love stories didn’t end with the classics. Modern authors understand love in all its messy, complicated, beautiful reality.
- “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” – Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
- “This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
- “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.” – Frank O’Hara
- “I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you.” – Haruki Murakami
- “So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
- “You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed.” – Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
- “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” – Haruki Murakami
- “We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement.” – Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
- “Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Quotes About Being Loved Completely
These quotes capture what it feels like to be truly seen and loved by someone, flaws and all. They remind me of how my husband looks at me, even on my worst days.
- “The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.” – George Orwell, 1984
- “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything but think about her.” – Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
- “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” – Zelda Fitzgerald
- “Her love was entire as a child’s, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring.” – Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
- “You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.” – Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
- “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” – Roald Dahl, The Witches
- “If it is right, it happens—the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” – John Steinbeck
- “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” – G.K. Chesterton
- “I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.” – Alice Walker
- “Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.” – Rabindranath Tagore
Passionate and Intense Love
Sometimes love isn’t gentle or easy, it’s overwhelming and all-consuming. These quotes capture that kind of love that changes everything.
- “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.” – John Donne
- “We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.” – Robert Fulghum
- “Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
- “To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.” – Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- “He is half of my soul, as the poets say.” – Madeline Miller
- “Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.” – Neil Gaiman, Stardust
- “They held each other and kissed and pushed each others’ darkness into the corner, believing in each others’ light, each others’ dream.” – Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
- “I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” – E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
- “Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.” – Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
- “If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.” – Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
Read also 60 Best Shakespeare Love Quotes That Still Make Hearts Flutter
Why These Quotes Matter
After years of marriage and the chaos of raising two boys, quotes like these remind me why I fell in love in the first place. They capture moments and feelings that are easy to forget when you’re dealing with laundry and bedtime routines and whose turn it is to take out the trash. But love is still there underneath all the everyday stuff, and these beautiful words help me remember that.
My husband doesn’t send me quotes every day, but when he does, it means everything. A random text with a beautiful quote in the middle of a Tuesday? That’s the kind of gesture that makes me feel cherished. It shows he’s thinking about me, that he took a moment out of his day to tell me I matter.
If you’re looking for the perfect quote to send to the woman you love, any of these will do the job. Send one when she’s having a hard day. Send one just because. Send one on your anniversary or on a random Thursday. Trust me, she’ll save it, screenshot it, probably even show her friends. Because women remember these moments, these little reminders that we’re loved.
Great love stories aren’t just in books, they’re being written every single day by regular people who choose each other over and over again. Sometimes all it takes is the right words at the right time to remind someone why they fell in love with you in the first place.
