Classic Book Quotes About Love, With Meaning and Context

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

Darcy's first proposal. Most of the sentences are about fighting feeling rather than feeling; the confession is the last twelve words. Austen wrote a love declaration as a complaint, and the entire rejection scene that follows is partly a response to its tone.

“My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”

The second proposal, in a single careful sentence. No struggling, no claim, no demand on her reply. Compare it to the first proposal four chapters earlier; this is what a proud man who has stopped being proud writes.

“Till this moment I never knew myself.”

Often quoted as a love line; it is in fact a self-knowledge line. Elizabeth says it after Darcy's letter forces her to realise she has been wrong. Austen's argument: love is not what changed Elizabeth, evidence was.

“Her voice is full of money.”

The moment Gatsby tells the truth about Daisy. Five years of obsession, and the thing he names as her quality is her inheritance. Fitzgerald lets him praise her with this line; the praise is what makes it so exposing.

“Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!”

The exclamation marks are the tragedy. Anyone who has loved another person from a distance for five years knows the line is wrong. Fitzgerald gives the wrongness to Gatsby in three sentences so the rest of the novel can take it apart.

“She confused, in her desire, the sensualities of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment.”

Flaubert on Emma's reading injury. The novel argues that bad novels produce bad lives by giving people the wrong sentences to feel with. The whole tragedy of Madame Bovary is in this confusion.

“I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.”

Edna's hierarchy: money, then life, then self. In 1899 a wife's life was already assumed to belong to her children; Chopin's heroine concedes that and refuses one further thing. The novel is the slow working-out of what the refusal costs.

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

Often quoted as villainy. Mary Shelley wrote it as despair. The creature has asked for one thing across the novel: a being like himself. Victor has destroyed it. The vow is a substitution for the request he has finally been refused.

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

Charlotte will marry Mr Collins on exactly this principle. Austen does not condemn her; she shows it as the pragmatic choice of an unmarried woman of twenty-seven without money. The line sets up the novel's real moral question.

“I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it.”

Beauty as transaction. Dorian's love is for his own image; the wish that follows is the consequence. Wilde's argument: ordinary vanity, given the chance to become metaphysical, is a kind of bomb.