The excruciating experience of loving without being loved back is universal. And it’s perhaps one of the greatest tragedies that exist for the human heart. It can be harsh, bitter and unbearable and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
No wonder so many writers and poets have used language to express, or rather release this almost venom-like sense of infatuation or even obsession. Here are some of the best quotes about what it feels like to go through unrequited love and heartache.
MORE: How It Feels To Fall In Love With Someone Who Will Never Love You Back
1. Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously. Cassandra Clare
2. Unrequited love does not die; it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before. Elle Newmark, The Book of Unholy Mischi
3. Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart. Washington Irving
4. To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves. Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding
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5. One is never too old to yearn. Italian Proverb
6. I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Pip to Estella in Great Expectations
7. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have — to want and want — how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
8. Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow. James Matthew Barrie
MORE: 16 Heart-Wrenching And Powerful Quotes About Losing A Loved One
9. With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait. Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flowers
10. 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. Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
11. You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back. Anonymous
12. How do you make yourself not like someone? Louise Rennison
MORE: 17 Love Quotes That Speak About The Hard Truths Of Relationships
13. We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. Sigmund Freud
14. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it. J. K. Rowling
15. There’s nothing quite so humbling as thinking you’re completely over someone, then realizing you’re not even close. Brian Strause, Maybe a Miracle
