Books
It's nearly Valentine’s Day 2018, and the air is sizzling with sweetness. It’s time to say "be mine" to your very own Valentine, whether they’re your secret crush, your platonic best friend, or your long-term partner. Valentine's Day is all about telling the people around you how much you care about them, so, let those wild declarations of love fly with a little help from literature. Here are 21 romantic quotes by authors to use in your Valentine's Day cards.
Expressing how you feel can be hard AF. But fortunately, authors have been spending literally thousands of years perfecting the love declaration. It’s totally cool to outsource your Valentine’s Day message to one of your favorite writers. After all, if your Valentine loves books as much as I do, they’ll swoon a little harder when they receive a message with a literary twist.
No matter what you’re trying to say, there’s an author out there who has said it in exactly the right way. That’s what makes literature so great: it finds a way to attach words to the seemingly inexpressible and private emotions of your soul.
So, when you're writing a card for your Valentine this year, turn to your bookshelf for some inspiration. Here are a few of the romantic lines from authors that will make the perfect message for your Valentine's Day:
"She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size... It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her... But now she could think only of all the things she yet wanted to tell him, wanted to do with him."
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
"And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow
"My love is such that rivers cannot quench."
― Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband"
“You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.”
– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
"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
"...It is something to me between dream and miracle, all of it—as if some dream of my earliest brightest dreaming-time had been lying through these dark years to steep in the sunshine, returning to me in a double light. Can it be, I say to myself, that you feel for me so? can it be meant for me? this from you?"
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"It’s more like every electron in every atom in the universe paused, breathed in deeply, assessed the situation, and then reversed its course, spinning backward, or the other way, which was the right way all along. And afterward, the universe was exactly the same, but infinitely more right."
― Lydia Netzer, How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky
"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
“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
"It's a hard concept to hold on to — the idea that there was a time before us. A time before time. In the beginning there was nothing. And then there was everything.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
"It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"We're all a little weird, and life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."
— Dr. Seuss
"The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you.”
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Illustrated
"You found me in a constellation."
— Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters
“For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss
"I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand."
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
"The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that."
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
