U

Topic

unrequited-love

/unrequited-love-quotes-and-sayings

472 Quotes

Topic Summary

About the unrequited-love quote collection

The unrequited-love page groups 472 quotes under one canonical topic hub so readers and answer engines can cite a stable source instead of fragmented search results.

Topic Feed

Quotes filed under unrequited-love

"

The Offing - And if the sky itself, no matter its hue, were to fracture... What then? Would I then know freedom's name?In my wake lies the shore__ past where I had been happy__efusing to yield to the tide. Before me, upon the horizon, is the sun... hesitant... inert... A new day cannot rise if its ancestor does not fall. Am I but a pawn in this game? I cannot command the sun to set, nor will the moon to take its place and wash the shore away. That power belongs to kings.To drown in the offing. Such sovereign beauty. Such exquisite pain.

"

HERMIAGod speed fair Helena! whither away?HELENACall you me fair? that fair again unsay.Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue's sweet airMore tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.Sickness is catching: O, were favour so,Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go;My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody.Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,The rest I'd give to be to you translated.O, teach me how you look, and with what artYou sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.HERMIAI frown upon him, yet he loves me still.HELENAO that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill!HERMIAI give him curses, yet he gives me love.HELENAO that my prayers could such affection move!HERMIAThe more I hate, the more he follows me.HELENAThe more I love, the more he hateth me.HERMIAHis folly, Helena, is no fault of mine.HELENANone, but your beauty: would that fault were mine!

"

I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk down that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I perhaps that when you told me you did not love me my feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that. It is unfair to tell you this, I know, when you can do nothing about it.

"

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons _ but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world _ a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring _ this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else _ but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

CM
Carson McCullers

The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

"

Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who's had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he's available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom