The Friday Five: Best Literary Love Quotes

If you couldn’t tell from last week’s posts (here and here), Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. Although I’m not enamored with the idea of taking just one day to let someone know how you feel about them, I can’t help but smile when I see all the beautifully-wrapped chocolates in the stores and begin hearing more smarmy love songs on the radio. In honor of a holiday that may or may not be Hallmark’s excuse to instill feelings of love/happiness/loneliness/inadequacy in us that we didn’t know we had, I would like to present some of my favorite love quotes from books and literature. (No, you will not find anything from the Twilight saga here.) Feel free to recite some of these to your significant other if you want to seem worldly/nerdy!

The Friday Five: Best Literary Love Quotes

1. “I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.” – Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

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2. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” – Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

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3. “I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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4. “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.” – Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

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5. “No one actually needs another person or another person’s love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.” – Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

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And here’s a bonus that will forever be my all-time favorite.

“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter – “
“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”
“For him?” shouted Snape. “Expecto Patronum!”
From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe. She landed on the office floor, bounded once across the office, and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
“After all this time?”
“Always,” said Snape.
— Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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What are some of your favorites?