Love has fascinated artists, writers, and thinkers for centuries. Explore their most inspiring long form love quotes that still touch our hearts today

1. Excerpt from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Do you think I can stay and be your nothing? Do you think I’m an automaton? An emotionless machine? Can I stand a small piece of my bread being snatched from my mouth and a drop of my living water being washed away from my cup? Do you think that because I am poor, silent, ordinary, and small, I have no soul and no heart? You’re thinking wrong! – I have a soul like you – and I am as full as you are! If God blesses me with some beauty and wealth, I can make it hard for you to leave me, just as I leave you now. I am not speaking to you now by custom, or convention, or even by the flesh of a mortal; It is my Spirit that speaks to your Spirit; It was as if both had walked through the grave and we stood at the feet of God, equal—just like us! 

2. Excerpt from “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell

I love what I make up, something that dies like Melly. I made a beautiful outfit and fell in love with it. When I saw that it was just a set of clothes and couldn’t love me, it was as if I first discovered it. That’s when I realized that I had never really loved Ashley. […] I love you, but I’ll do everything I can to get you back to her because I think I’m in it for your happiness, even if it means breaking my heart. But you were so nasty, so vile, so filthy that night I will never forget. 

3. Excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”

He now felt that he wasn’t just close to her, and that he didn’t know where he ended up and where she began. He felt it from the painful sense of division he experienced in that moment. He was offended, but immediately felt that he couldn’t be offended by her, that she was him. Now, for the first time, he was fully experiencing that previously unknown inner, spiritual tenderness, and he didn’t know what to say to her

4. Excerpt from “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

I can’t express it; But what is certain is that you and everyone have a notion that there is or should be your existence outside of you. What is the use of my creation if I am completely contained here? My greatest suffering in this world is that of Heathcliff, and I have observed and felt every suffering from the beginning: the great thought of my life is himself. If all is dead, and he remains, I should continue to exist; If everything else had stayed and he had been annihilated, the universe would have turned into a powerful stranger 

5. From “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.