42 romantic quotes to make your toes curl

Great collection of romantic quotes on @offbeatbride — Photo by Wild About You Photography – CC BY 2.0

I try to play it cool, but wow am I ever a sucker for romance and romantic quotes. Still, a good line has to be unique, you know? It has to strike a certain je ne sais quoi to make my heart strings go twang. Bonus points if it’s nerdy or obscurely literary or a sci-fi reference.

You’ve seen our list of 52 incredibly romantic and not (too) cheesy love quotes, right? Well, I’m here to give you Part Two, with 42 more quotes to make your toes curl in the best possible ways. And, oh my gosh, there is a Terry Pratchett quote in here, people, which makes this the best lineup of love quotes officially in the history of ever.

Use these quotes on your invitations, your favors, painted onto handmade art, embroidered on your table linens — however they speak to your offbeat love!

“I didn’t want to get married… But it was just like being at a flea market – you see one thing you never expected to find there and it’s so special you’ve gotta have it, even if it’s going to take all your money & you don’t know how you’ll ever get it home. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect… But we manage to work it out.”
-Joyce Brabner in “A Marriage Album,” part of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor

“You can’t trick somebody into loving you. There’s a reason two people come together and stay together – there’s something they give each other that nobody else can give them.”
–Lisa Simpson in “Secrets of a Successful Marriage,” The Simpsons

“Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
-George Orwell, 1984

“I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, ’twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures.”
-John Keats, a letter to Fanny Brawne

“Alas, we loved, sir — used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was — But then, how it was sweet!”
-Robert Browning, Confessions

“What’s wrong with you is good for what’s wrong with me.”
-Incubus, “Friends and Lovers”

“Where there is love, there is life.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

“This is my dream,
It is my own dream,
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.”
-Ogden Nash, My Dream

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
-eden abhez, Nature Boy

“This is our musical theater love story.
We’re making it scene to scene.
Our love is strong and growing,
On our journey to be free.”
-“Musical Theater Love Story” from The Big Gay Musical

“It’s still a thrill to turn and see you beside me.”
-Anders, Act 3, Dragon Age II.

“If there’s a future to be had, I will walk into it gladly at your side.” -Fenris, Act 3, Dragon Age II

“You love me, real or unreal?” “Real.”
-Peeta and Katniss, Mockingjay

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships – the ones that last – are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person, and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is… suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”
-Dana Scully, “The Rain King,” The X-Files

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country

Wherever you go, I’ll be with you
Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you
Whenever you need someone
To lay your heart and head upon
Remember, after the fire, after all the rain
I will be the flame
I will be the flame
-Cheap Trick, “The Flame”

“If I truly wanted someone bad enough, wouldn’t be a thing in the ‘verse that could stop me from going to her.”
-Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity

“I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…”
-Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“True love will triumph in the end — which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have.”
-John Green

“‘And what would humans be without love?’
‘RARE,’ said Death.”
-Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“But how hollow is the sound of victory without someone to share it with. Honor gives little comfort to a man alone in his home… and in his heart.”
– General Martok, “You Are Cordially Invited,” Deep Space Nine

“His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.”
-James Joyce, A Portrat of the Artist as a Young Man

“Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting — it’s going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
-Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’… but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other’s favour. That’s what love is, isn’t it?”
–David Mitchell, That Mitchell and Webb Look

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I ask you to pass through life at my side — to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Deux étions et n’avions qu’un coeur”
(“We were two and only had one heart.”)
-François Villon, Rondeau (Mort, j’appelle de ta rigueur)

“Tout… tout est mieux avec toi que sans.”
(“Everything is better with you than without you.”)
-Manu Larcenet, Le combat ordinaire

“Work is not an end in itself; there must always be time enough for love.”
-Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
-Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“If I became lost in
the multiverse, exploring
infinite parallel dimensions, my
only criterion for settling
down somewhere would be
whether or not I could find you:
and once I did, I’d stay there even
if it was a world ruled by giant spider-
priests, or one where killer
robots won the Civil War, or even
a world where sandwiches
were never invented, because
you’d make it the best
of all possible worlds anyway,
and plus
we could get rich
off inventing sandwiches.”
-Tim Pratt, Scientific Romance

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”
–Carl Sagan

“You should know how great things were before you. Even so, they’re better still today. I can’t think of who I was before you ruined everything in the nicest way.”
-Jonathan Coulton, You Ruined Everything

“May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
-Ray Bradbury

“The intellectual is always showing off;
the lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love is to drown in the sea.
Intellectuals plan their repose;
lovers are ashamed to rest.
The lover is always alone, even surrounded with people;
like water and oil, he remains apart.
The man who goes to the trouble
of giving advice to a lover
gets nothing. He’s mocked by passion.
Love is like musk. It attracts attention.
Love is a tree, and lovers are its shade.”
-Rumi, The Intellectual

“I love you, not for what I want you to be, but for what you are.”
-Leonard Nimoy

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
-John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“But when two people are at one in the inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts,
Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids”
–I Ching (The Book of Changes)

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist