c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If you can see a cop in your rear view mirror - no matter how far back the cop is - TURN!" according to Attorney Rex Curry, "The sooner you turn the better. Your goal while driving should be to never let a law enforcement officer into a position where he can pull you over. Don't even let them come close enough to read your tag.
— Ian Tinny, Drug Detection Dog Training: Libertarian Lawyers Fight Police State USA
Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything
—  there was nothing that was not allowed.
When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical – all constraints having disappeared – it is evident that we will be in a state of total liverty or anarchy.
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Libertarian opponents of anarchy are attacking a straw man. Their arguments are usually utilitarian in nature and amount to "but anarchy won’t work" or "we need the (things provided by the) state." But these attacks are confused at best, if not disingenuous. To be an anarchist does not mean you think anarchy will "work" (whatever that means); nor that you predict it will or "can" be achieved. It is possible to be a pessimistic anarchist, after all. To be an anarchist only means that you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily employ aggression. And, therefore, that states, and the aggression they necessarily employ, are unjustified. It’s quite simple, really. It’s an ethical view, so no surprise it confuses utilitarians.Accordingly, anyone who is not an anarchist must maintain either: (a) aggression is justified; or (b) states (in particular, minimal states) do not necessarily employ aggression.
— N. Stephan Kinsella
THE WORLD IS APPROACHING TOWARDS ANARCHY" :The second law of thermodynamics concludes that the entropy of universe is increasing with time . Which means with time , the randomness or disorderness is also increasing. Anarchy is the condition of excessive social entropy . Thus , we can conclude that finally universe will reach to the condition of anarchy .-anup joshi
— Anup Joshi
Yes I pay taxes... There are no ethics in the face of coercion, that is blaming the victim. Focus on the man with the gun, not the man in the crosshairs trying to survive.
— Stefan Molyneux
First, with the establishment of a state and territorially defined state borders, “immigration” takes on an entirely new meaning. In a natural order, immigration is a person’s migration from one neighborhood-community into a different one (micro-migration). In contrast, under statist conditions immigration is immigration by “foreigners” from across state borders, and the decision whom to exclude or include, and under what conditions, rests not with a multitude of independent private property owners or neighborhoods of owners but with a single central (and centralizing) state-government as the ultimate sovereign of all domestic residents and their properties (macro-migration). If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe
The problems in every country are the same. Bureaucracy is strangling innovation. Overgrown political sectors are sucking away resources that could otherwise lead to growth. Regulations and taxes are punishing innovation. Public sector services are breaking down and no longer serving people's needs. Laws and prevailing legislation control a world that no longer exists. People who go into politics to change the system end up getting co-opted by it. Workers feel trapped and fear a lack out options outside the status quo. In every case, it comes down to the great evil of our time and all times: government itself. There is no place on earth in which more liberty and less or no government would not be welcome and bring about real progress.
— Jeffrey Tucker
We revolutionary anarchists are the enemies of all forms of State and State organisations ... wethink that all State rule, all governments being by their very nature placed outside the mass of thepeople, must necessarily seek to subject it to customs and purposes entirely foreign to it. Wetherefore declare ourselves to be foes ... of all State organisations as such, and believe that thepeople can only be happy and free, when, organised from below by means of its own autonomousand completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its ownlife.
— Mikhail Bakunin
The laws governed people’s happiness. To be lawless was to be happy.
— Jess C. Scott, Soulmates
They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.
— Mikhail Bakunin
I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.
— Winston S. Churchill
The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanised automaton.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.
— Pyotr Kropotkin
While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation.
— L. Susan Brown, The Politics of Individualism: Liberalism, Liberal Feminism and Anarchism
The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society.
— Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful
—  they will save me lots of work.
Beautiful, seamless upgrade from Twitter today, making functionality smoother and cooler. We didn't have to lobby, didn't have to beg, didn't have to elect a new leader, didn't have to push or protest. Progress is built in to the structure of the mechanism itself: this company exists to please you and me. This is a far better system than any political system on earth.
— Jeffrey Tucker
The government is ethics rape in perpetuity
— Stefan Molyneux
the fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it's definite unifying powers
—  it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself
The reason for which Picasso was compelled to resort to signs and allegories should now be clear enough: his utter political helplessness in the face of a historical situation which he set out to record; his titanic effort to confront a particular historical event with an allegedly eternal truth; his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event. Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automaton of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea.
— Max Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso
Anarchy is merely the illusion of liberty.
— Stephan Attia, The Balance of Justice
Not only my arrest but the others smack of the Haymarket. The police are very much in disrepute all over the country, and they wish to do something to clear themselves. They are trying to make it an anarchist plot. If they wish to make up a case, they may succeed.
— Emma Goldman
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
— Étienne de La Boétie
Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers’ organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance. Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution.
— Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice
Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,Thou art the grisly terror of our age."Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,"Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage."0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have strivenThe 'truth that lies behind a word to find, To them the word's right meaning was not given.They shall continue blind among the blind.But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true,Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.I give thee to the future! Thine secureWhen each at least unto himself shall waken.Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?I cannot tell - but it the earth shall see!I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I willNot rule, & also ruled I will not be!
— John Henry Mackay
The leather community is largely anarchistic and shares a healthy distrust of power and arrogance.
— Geoff Mains, Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality
A preoccupation with power - black power, student power, flower power, poor power, 'the power structure' - is the striking aspect of the American political scene at the moment. Oddly enough, obsession with power goes hand in hand with a fear of power. Some of the New Left groups that talk the toughest about power are extremely reluctant to see power operate in any institutional form; within their own organizations, they shun 'hierarchies' and formally structured relations of authority. What the preoccupation with power reflects, essentially, is a deep=seated, pervasive feeling of powerlessness.
— Carey McWilliams
One of the great things about anarchy is that it’s hard to get it organized.
— George Hammond
I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
The way he looked at you. I got it then. He loved you, and it was killing him. He won't get over you, Clary, he can't.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?
— James Patterson, The Angel Experiment
I wouldn't change it," Simon said. "I wouldn't give up loving you. Not for anything. You know what Raphael told me? That I didn't know how to be a good vampire, that vampires accept that they're dead. But as long as I remember what it was like to love you, I'll always feel like I'm alive.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
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.
— Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it's perfect... As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
A person doesn't know true hurt and suffering until they've felt the pain of falling in love with someone whose affections lie elsewhere.
— Rose Gordon, Her Imperfect Groom
She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.
— Julia Quinn, The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever
We're cool," I say calmly, although I feel something else. I feel... sad. Like I've lost something I never quite had.
— Christine Seifert, The Predicteds
I had discovered that there was something more painful than falling in love with someone who hasn't fallen for you
—  hurting that person-hurting him and not being able to do anything about it.
When unrequited love is the most expensive thing on the menu, sometimes you settle for the daily special.
— Miranda Kenneally, Catching Jordan
Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.
— Cassandra Clare
You loved me-then what right had you to leave me? What right-answer me-for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine."~Heathcliff
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!O any thing, of nothing first create!O heavy lightness, serious vanity,Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Never fall in love with someone that won't fight for you because when the real battles begin they won't pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.
— Shannon L. Alder
I’d always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth.
— Alma Katsu, The Taker
In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine, connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least – for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women – my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?''Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.
— Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
When you love something, you have to make sure it loves you back, or you'll bring about no end of trouble chasing it.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
I loved you even when you forgot me.And—for a little while—you loved me back.
— Julio Alexi Genao, When You Were Pixels
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
— Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Out of her favour, where I am in love.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
— Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
You know, unrequited love is very difficut? It's not just having this one-sided love of someone who's far away. Being close, talking daily, liking a guy who's constantly near me is harder than it would be under different circumstances.
— So Hee Park
The biggest curse in life is not loosing your love, but not being loved by someone you love.
— Kiran Joshi
I’ve always loved you,” he said, his eyes a blue that was almost violet. “You know this.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I only wonder whether I deserve such devotion.”“Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strength of feelings. It is as it is,” he said with a quiet intensity. “What I give, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation.
— Sherry Thomas, Tempting the Bride
Besides, unrequited love is one of those things that all teen-agers have to go through, right?
— Wendy Higgins, Sweet Evil
Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.
— Cathleen Schine, The Love Letter
Which is when I decided I would never love anyone again because you just felt like an idiot when you put love out there and it didn't come back your way.
— Karen Tayleur, Love Notes From Vinegar House
I never hated you. My anger was never with you, but with the little hell my heart had put me in. The anger always passed. I never regretted loving you. If I had gone to my grave never kissing you or touching you, I still would not have thought it a wasted love.
— Madeline Hunter, The Romantic
I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.
— Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225)
— André Aciman
In the garden, the Captain of the Guard stared up at the young woman's balcony, watching as she waltzed alone, lost in her dreams. But he knew her thoughts weren't of him.
— Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
Let her remain where she is. A constellation away.
— Eric Gamalinda, My Sad Republic
She said she didn't love him, and he said it didn't matter, and the poverty of their words brought tears to their eyes.
— Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an
And so she shuddered away from the threat of his enduring love. What did he mean? Had she not the power to daunt him? She would see. It was more daring than became a man to threaten her.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.
— Gregory Maguire, The Next Queen of Heaven
She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not ‘til the day he dies. Not even then.
— Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight
I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.
— André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
Granted, I'd waited a long time to hear those words. Would've sold a kidney-maybe two-to have heard them at one point. Now, though...they didn't have the same impact. They were, in fact, an overcooked noodle in the pasta salad of love.
— Kristan Higgins
I've pushed your love away and I've run from you, sometimes I've checked out, but this is the reason. I just couldn't understand what we have. I mean we have never met in real life, yet we've loved each other for over 3 years.
— Chimnese Davids, My Unrequited Love Letters
He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
It was February sixth: eight days until Valentine's Day. I was dateless, as usual, deep in the vice grip of unrequited love. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids in their windows by January second to rub it in.
— Joan Bauer, Thwonk
The priest's lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal's doom. My grandmother's lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
And my desire,' he said, 'is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.
— Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland
He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
— Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise
Mom put dense cheddar bread into a bag for a man who said this was his wife's favorite - he'd driven all the way from New Jersey to buy it because today was their anniversary. Several women in the store jabbed their husbands on hearing this. I hung my head - Peter Terris wouldn't cross the street to buy me a Twinkie.
— Joan Bauer, Thwonk
I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.
— Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project
Graham’s thoughts of me were not entirely those of a frozen indifference, after all. I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written ‘Lucy’s Room.’ I kept a place for him too — a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand — yet, released from that hold and constriction, I knew not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Sometimes you grow to love the shadow that follows.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,Though you are the sister of the river willows,I will kill you with my singing,Without spilling your blood on the ground.Not touching you with my hand,Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,But with your unimaginable groansI will finally slake my thirst.From her, who wandered the earth before me,Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,From her, who still exists in the ether—From her you will set me free.
— Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now !I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.
— Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories
And, long after Clark had gone home, Solomon stayed up wondering if everyone falls in love with someone who can't love them back.
— John Corey Whaley, Highly Illogical Behavior
I've decided to take this unrequited love, and quietly put it away in a corner of my heart as a bittersweet page of my youth.
— Shuu Maiko (Nisekoi)
What do you want from me, Snow?""Nothing," he says. And he means it, the actual bastard.
— Rainbow Rowell, Carry On
I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Ree is his. Is his, is devoted to him, is aggravatingly tender and possessively passionate and wrapped up in him in a thousand ways, loves him in a way that is very useful. It seems a law of nature, at this point. Even if the events of this startling evening have served to give him pause, a little. But Ree is still his. He's fairly sure. Such complex knots can't be untied so quickly, can they?Still, it's not the only thing disturbing him, about the Dam's account of early events. She laughs when she sees his face, his sidewise look at her description, and there's definitely a mean note to it. “Oh, it was darling,” she says, and he gets the feeling of a caged animal stuck behind bars, while a cruel child pokes at it. “You were enchanted by his wolf, would follow it anywhere, welcome or not, though mostly he tolerated it. But you couldn't manage his name – and a nickname hadn't stuck at that point – so instead you imitated the sound he made. Rather insultingly, too, if not intentionally – Ruff. Or Woof, or whatever it was that you intended to say, except that it actually came out as Wuff. Or Wuffy, depending, and at varying pitches and volume as you ran after him, falling down and rolling about half the ti
— Alex Ankarr, Wolf Runaway
It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.
— Naomi Alderman, Disobedience
Time machine to the pastStep back a few yearsOld feelings, like LazarusSuddenly reappear.It's your song on the radioAnd it's your hand in mineAs this wave crashes over meOur stars again come unaligned.
— Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe
I wanted to say "don't leave me," but I'm so tired of begging people to stay.
— R. Y.S. Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
...the hardest word to swallow is almost.
— R. Y.S. Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
I've dreamt of us falling in love and being together in a million different ways, yet I still wake up in the one way without you.
— Charlotte Deanna Harper
Sentimental outbreaks are like liquorice; when first you suck it, it's not bad, but afterwards it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.
— Ivan Turgenev, Diary of a Superfluous Man
I thought that you could hear all my unspoken words.....for I misunderstood the language of my own love was so intense and your ears were so brittle!
— BinYamin Gulzar
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.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
unrequited love is the most selfless love.
— Stefanie Sta. Maria
At that moment the ghost dance seems to Zinnia like the relationship of two people who never quite consummate the love they feel for each other.
— Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree
My head is full of seeing you see me.
— Julie Berry, All the Truth That's in Me
To love completely is to remember a time and place before
—  the knowledge of losing it only strengthens it. —from Who Has Known Heights: The Mystique Memoirs of a Melancholic Mind
That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.
— Sachin Kundalkar, Cobalt Blue
Every night I build a fire for you, Alowa. Every night I dance on the rooftop for you. Look at the flames, Alowa. Aren’t they beautiful? Look at the smoke. I’m dancing in the smoke, Alowa.
— Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
If I could undo everything," Tony said, "I would never have gone to that party. I was an idiot, Kelly, and it cost me the love of my life.
— Lydia Larue, Undercover Desire
Make me a willow cabin at your gateAnd call upon my soul within the house;Write loyal cantons of contemned loveAnd sing them loud even in the dead of night;Hallo your name to the reverberate hillsAnd make the babbling gossip of the airCry out "Olivia!" O, you should not restBetween the elements of air and earthBut you should pity me
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
It is a horrible wonderful thing to be in love with you. To get to hear you sing for hour after hour but never be the subject of the song. To listen and listen and listen.
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
The world shrinks to include only two people, only one of whom -- the beloved -- has power. This inequitable distribution naturally breeds resentment and feelings of hopelessness that the dependent person dare not express for fear of alienating the necessary person even more.
— Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured.
— Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
She is the weakness you think of as strength while I am the strength you have no idea is there.
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
You think I need an orgasm to enjoy sex?” she demanded. “What are you, like fifteen?” She eyed him in disgust. “I can get my own orgasms just fine. Last night was not about me getting off. It was about comfort and solace. About helping you to forget for a while.”Ethan blinked as the full magnitude of her words pelted him like shrapnel. “Oh my God. It was a pity fuck?
— Amy Andrews, Some Girls Lie
What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
She could never be part of so much of his turbulent history, his youthful adventure, where life had been deeply felt.
— Jane Hamilton
No god will spare you forgiveness for loving me.
— Liam Levi, Thousand Sinful Kisses
All that existed was the blinding imperative to not think, to leave it all behind. To have it all fade to black in the throes of a truly good orgasm. To thrust and rock and pound until he came long and hard. To reach the pinnacle as fast as he could, to leap off the edge and truly leave all his earth-bound worries behind.He was a cave man. He was a Neanderthal. He was fucking Cro-Magnon.
— Amy Andrews, Some Girls Lie
Not a day or an hour and sometimes not even a moment in advance did I have any idea what Patrick had in mind for me, or whether he had me in mind at all. This uncertainty lay like a sore under the surface of my skin, erupting again and again, then subsiding, but never healing.
— Jan Ellison, A Small Indiscretion
What, Kilorn?' I sigh. 'What,' he echoes, shaking his head. After a long second, something snaps in him. 'I know you don't feel the same way I do. About us.' I'm seized by the urge to smash my head against a rock. Us. It feels stupid to talk about, a foolish waste of time and energy. But more than that, it's embarrassing and uncomfortable. My cheeks flame red. This is not a conversation I ever wanted to have with him.
— Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword
JJ glared at his slumbering frame. Long legs, lethal in denim, his button fly already enticingly popped, abdomen all ridged and naked, begging for a finger or a tongue to discover the hills and valleys, dark shaggy hair spread around his head like a freaking halo on her pillow. Well too damn bad for this broken-down angel. She was the one who’d worked her ass off until two am. Not him. And she wanted her bed back.
— Amy Andrews, Some Girls Lie
Think of you! I do not think of you
—  you are always before my soul.
Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first [met you]. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since,—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I’ve had many crushes before, but none so deep as this. Your scent’s the only thing I crave; you’re the only one I miss.
— Veronica Nagorny, Thoughts as I Lie Dreaming
Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?''That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel.
— Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
I'm not unlucky at love, just incredibly lucky with celibacy.
— Tim Heaton
Some people are like an open grave:You give it the thing you love mostAnd then get nothing in return.
— Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri, Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets
The only thing sadder than unrequited love is being in a relationship where there is unrequited love.
— Shannon L. Alder
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!
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Oh yes, it's very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren't they much more common?
— Gabrielle Zevin, Because It Is My Blood
Why weren't we born in the same era?" he lamented. She eased past him neither here nor there, looked over her shoulder and whispered, "How mundane and cliche would that be?
— Donna Lynn Hope
The unrequited love of ones' only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn
— David Nicholls
...and yes even loved him even though logic and reason told me I had no business feeling that way about him but I didn't care, no I loved him, and wanted him to know it not because I expected him to reciprocate )and yes even loved him even though logic and reason told me I had no business feeling that way about him but I didn't care, no I(even though I really really wanted him to) but because if someone ever loved me in that pure way I would want to know about it
— Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts
At the ponds that evening I said to Antonio: "It's always been like that, since we were little: everyone thinks she's bad and I'm good."He kissed me, murmuring ironically, "Why, isn't that true?"That response touched me and kept me from telling him that we had to part. It was a decision that seemed to me urgent, the affection wasn't love, I loved Nino, I knew I would love him forever. I had a gentle speech prepared for Antonio, I wanted to say to him: It's been wonderful, you helped me a lot at a time when I was sad, but now school is starting and this year is going to be difficult, I have new subjects, I'll have to study a lot; I'm sorry but we have to stop. I felt it was necessary and every afternoon I went to our meeting at the ponds with my little speech ready. But he was so affectionate, so passionate, that my courage failed and I put it off.
— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
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—a past where I had been happy—refusing 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.
— RJ Arkhipov
Jemima Jane Erickson was one drunken pass away from jumping Ethan Weston's bones. He just didn't know it.
— Amy Andrews, Some Girls Lie
Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.
— Louise Glück
Which is worse? Loving someone and not being able to be with them or not loving someone and having to be with them.
— Donna Lynn Hope
The Hardest thing about being broken, isn't the Love you don't receive, It's the Love you long to give that nobody wants..
— Dinesh Kumar Biran
The pain that comes from unrequited love is more than outweighed by the revelation that my heart is not dead.
— Rmg
And she never knew that he laid awake the whole time, his lips at her temple, his hand against her hair.Whispering her name.Whispering other words as well.
— Julia Quinn, When He Was Wicked
Time didn’t heal my heal wounds but it lent me perspective. My vision was no longer clouded and I saw what I’d become. I’d let inspiration become obsession. Tunnel vision had hindered all progress. I was so fixated on you, I got stuck.
— Ashley Sarel
I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I loved her the moment I laid eyes on her.She blinked - her thoughts at the time were of anotherI could not win her heart20 years and many others who did.I would have been there,any time - anywhere. I was there, though all those gaps all her heartaches - all her pain and still it was never me. Never me, never would be be.20 years holding out - I may have the real thing in the next 20 years - still it will never be her.I am not dead and she is not a ghost.save yourself - you can no longer save me.
— SmokinBrit
Act that way and slowly but surely I will fade away. All the dawns and all the twilights will rob me, piece by piece, of myself, and before long my very life will be shaved away completely - and I would end up nothing.
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Did you hear about Katie Parkinson? ... She's going out with Christopher... They've been kissing.""It was like a Semtex explosion in my brain. I did not know whether to cry or run away.
— Will Once, Global Domination for Beginners
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
— Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen