Literary Quotes for a Pink Holiday

 I love Valentine's Day. What's there not to love? Whether one has a significant other or not, why dislike a holiday when someone, anyone in your life, has made it known that they love you, or that you're thought of, or appreciated? Plus there's cute little Valentine's Day cards with corny puns, loads of sweet treats, and the color pink is everywhere (a color I absolutely can't live without)! So I'll say it again. I love Valentine's Day. Always have, always will. The holiday, to me, was always about letting as many people as possible know you loved and/or appreciated them--friends, family, neighbors, classmates, significant others, etc.

Well, it's two days after Valentine's Day and I couldn't let the week end without posting something in the spirit of the season. I'm not one for the romance genre when it comes to literature, but there have been a few books in my life when a romance, be it timeless or epic or even tragic, has tugged at my heart. So here are some of my favorite literary love quotes from those very books. Some are heartwarming, others heartbreaking. Some you might recognize like an old song, others you might have just been introduced. Whichever, all of them are laced with love in whatever form it comes. I'd like to think of this as the appreciation post to the rare moments I was moved by romance in literature. So without further ado....   




"The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her nonetheless because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection."

--Charles Dickens, Great Expectations


"Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss."

--Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary



"Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!"

-- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights




“You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you'll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away. Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.”

-- Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

"Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.."

--Stephen King, IT


"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

-- Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's



"I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one."

--Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre


“They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.”

-- Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind



"Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me."

--Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre


"Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


"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




"Forgive me for startling you with the impetuosity of my sentiments, my dear Scarlett...It cannot have escaped your notice that for some time past the friendship I have had in my heart for you has ripened into a deeper feeling, a feeling more beautiful, more pure, more sacred. Dare I name it you? Ah! It is love which makes me so bold!"

--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind




"Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart."

-- Stephen King, IT


What's a romantic quote in a book you've read that pulled at your heart strings, or broke your heart in several places, or made a believer in love out of your doubtful black soul? ( kidding.) I'd love to know! Leave your favorites in a comment below!


                                                                            xo Nina