Books

11 Iconic Love Letter Quotes To Caption Your Next Instagram With Bae

by Melissa Ragsdale

Back in the dark ages before social media, the best way to tell someone you loved them was through a beautiful love letter. Crazy, right? Obviously, these days, we can communicate instantly with our loved ones, but once upon a time, you had to put actual pen to actual paper and wait wait days, weeks, or even months to hear back.

There's definitely something magical about these old-school forms of communication: polaroid pictures and handwritten letters, voicemails left on machines. There's a tender deliberateness that comes with the knowledge that these things took effort and time. There's a sweet intimacy to seeing your lover's handwriting on an envelope, or hearing their voice in your ear.

But modern technology has its own magic, too, like the ability to keep your partner with you in your pocket at all times, no matter where you are, through texts and Instagram and Facetime. There's a certain thrill that occurs when you see your crush has liked one of your pictures. And there's nothing quite as lovely as crafting a perfectly romantic Instagram caption for bae.

I say, let's combine the new with the old. Let's bring the candor of those days to today's methods of communications. Because even though technology has certainly changed, love is timeless, right? Nobody knows more about declaring love than authors, so take your cues from their famous love letters when you craft your next Instagram caption for you and your special someone:

1

"I love you because I love you, because it would be impossible not to love you. I love you without question, without calculation, without reason good or bad, faithfully, with all my heart and soul, and every faculty."

2

"I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams. I want you to be with me; you can have all the spaces between the houses, and I can have a room with no windows; we'll make a halfway house; you can teach me to walk in the air, and I'll teach you to make nice noises on the piano without any music; we'll have a bed in a bar, as we said we would, and we shan't have any money at all and we'll live on other people's."

3

"Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”

4

"But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us, — but they never will, unless you wish it.”

5

"My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again."

6

"Take them all – I don't want to win – I want to lose everything to you!”

7

"How could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?"

8

"Dearest, — I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you."

9

"And now listen to me in turn. You have touched me more profoundly than I thought even you could have touched me — my heart was full when you came here today. Henceforward I am yours for everything."

10

"Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me."

11

"I shall cork up all my kindness — yet the fine volatile essence may fly off in my walk — you know not how much tenderness for you may escape in a voluptuous sigh, should the air, as is often the case, give a pleasurable movement to the sensations, that have been clustering round my heart, as I read this morning — reminding myself, every now and then, that the writer loved me."