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Love songs in particular are so compelling because love is probably the strongest emotion you can have, and I think it's relatable to absolutely everyone, whether it's unrequited love or love.
Sep 30, 2025
Unrequited love is all right in books and things, but in real life, it completely sucks
I think there's nothing more painful for anyone than unrequited love. If you've ever had that kind of physical access to someone and then, all of a sudden, that is denied, and yet you're still in love with that person, it's very, very, very painful to be around that person in a certain way.
Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.
On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
Life has now taught me that love for things, like all unrequited love, takes its toll in the long run.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.
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.
You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.
True values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s completely real, do we?…Longing is true. It may be that there’s no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It’s part of our reality.
With "Futurama," I wanted to do unrequited love, and David Cohen agreed, and although our original plan was never to have Fry and Leela get together, we finally just said, "You can only string the fans along so far."
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.
There's nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavor out of a peanut butter sandwich.
Snape's patronus was a doe,' said Harry, 'the same as my mother's because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children.
I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
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.
Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.
The female that loves unrequited sleeps, And the male that loves unrequited sleeps, The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps, And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved.
This unrequited love, to me it's nothing but a one-man cult/And cyanide in my styrofoam cup
Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.
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.
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.
You can close your eyes to the things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to the things you don't want to feel.
Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free; love me no more, but love my love of thee.
If we must part for ever, Give me but one kind word to think upon, And please myself withal, whilst my heart's breaking!
How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen!
Unrequited love," I'd say. He'd look at me sideways in that cunning way he did and say, "what about it?" and I'd reply, "it's not your color." Pithy. Just to show him that I'd noticed. Or maybe I'd show myself to her and say, "Guess I'm not the only one who uses humans around here." And then I'd summon some of Owain's hounds to chew off the bottom bits of her legs. Then she wouldn't fit just right into his arms. She'd be too short. It'd be like hugging a midget. Nuala- pg. 75
Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake.
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.
You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul.
Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest: Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers: Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest, And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!
Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night.
Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.
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 a hurricane.
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
There’s nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it’s shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn’t return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it’s unbearably boring. I’ll tell you what’s exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn’t dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad.
I had to get over [him]. For months now, a stone had been sitting on my heart. I'd shed a lot of tears over [him], lost a lot of sleep, eaten a lot of cake batter. Somehow, I had to move on. [Life] would be hell if I didn't shake loose from the grip he had on my heart. I most definitely didn't want to keep feeling this way, alone in a love affair meant for two. Even if he'd felt like The One. Even if I'd always thought we'd end up together. Even if he still had a choke chain on my heart.
I do not now begin, - I still adore Her whom I early cherish'd in my breast; Then once again with prudence dispossess'd, And to whose heart I'm driven back once more. The love of Petrarch, that all-glorious love, Was unrequited, and, alas, full sad.
Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction.
For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace.
When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels.
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.
When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.