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64 Heart Wrenching Quotes For When Love Feels Impossibly Bittersweet

Because real life isn't always sunshine and roses. 
Heidi Priebe
January 5, 2017
“The only thing scarier than telling someone you love them is telling them that you still love them.”
— Ella Dawson, Romantic Gesturing
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Breakups, Getting Back Together, I Love You
“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Manon Ballerina
Tagged: hurt, Pain, Love
“I've been trying to get down to the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter but I think it's about 
Forgiveness
Even if you don't love me anymore”
— Don Henley, Don Henley "The Heart Of The Matter" on Austin City Limits
Tagged: Love, forgiveness
“We're never so vulnerable as when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.”
— Walter Anderson, The Speed Of Trust
Tagged: Love, vulnerability
“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
Tagged: Time, Love, Loss, Pain, Grief
“To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone
Tagged: Love, Protection
“I hope you never love anything as much as I love you.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
Tagged: Love, Loss, Pain, Missing Someone, Unconditional Love
“You can't love anything more than something you miss.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
Tagged: Love, Missing Someone, Relationships, Long-Distance, Grief
“The future is scary, but you can't just run back to the past because it's familiar.”
— Robin Scherbatsky, How I Met Your Mother
Tagged: Future, Past, Comfort, Love, Familiarity, Relationships
“People aren’t always what you want them to be. Sometimes they disappoint you or let you down, but you have to give them a chance first. You can’t just meet someone and expect them to be everything you’re looking for and then be angry when they’re not every hope and aspiration you projected onto them. It’s foolish to believe that someone will be what you imagine them to be. And sometimes, when you give them a chance, they turn out to be better than you imagined. Different, but better.”
— Chloe Rattray, Sacré Noir
Tagged: Expectations, INFP, Love, People, Relationships, Disappointment, Realism
“I really care about you and I don’t want to anymore, because it feels really shitty for me.”
— Hannah Horvath, Girls
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Breakups, Girls
“People don’t write sonnets about being compatible, or novels about shared life goals and stimulating conversation. The great loves are the crazy ones.”
— Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Falling In Love, Big Love, Compatibility
“Just because we can’t be together doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
— Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl
Tagged: Relationships, Love, Exes
“It’s so painful to have loved someone once and then never again. Sometimes you’ll wish it never happened just so you didn’t know how good it felt. Then you remember that quote ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than to have ever loved at all’ and you’re like, ‘okay, fine.'”
— Ryan O'Connell, 25 Things You Should Know About Love
Tagged: Love, humor, Breakups, Pain, Relationships
“You will never love someone quite the same way you do the first time. In most cases, this is a good thing. The first time is fucking insane.”
— Ryan O'Connell, 25 Things You Should Know About Love
Tagged: Love, First Love, Relationships, Falling In Love
“Everyone is an idiot when it comes to matters of the heart. Love is the great equalizer. Whenever you feel intimidated by someone’s coolness, just imagine them sobbing in their bedroom after someone broke their heart. I guarantee it’s happened.”
— Ryan O'Connell, 25 Things You Should Know About Love
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Heartbreak, Heartache
“Love will make you into the best and worst version of yourself, often in the same night.”
— Ryan O'Connell, 25 Things You Should Know About Love
Tagged: Love, Relationships
“You’ll always care about your first love. That doesn’t make you crazy, it just makes you human. When relationships end, it’s not so cut and dry. You carry everyone you’ve ever loved into every relationship thereafter.”
— Ryan O'Connell, 25 Things I’ve Learned In My 20s
Tagged: Relationships, Love, First Love, Falling In Love
“It sucks to have this one person in your life that can derail you at a moment’s notice. But in a way, it feels good knowing that you could ever love someone so much. Or that’s what you tell yourself anyway. It doesn’t matter if something is true or not. The things we tell ourselves can become our truth.”
— Ryan O'Connell, The One Person You Never Really Get Over
Tagged: Love, Life, Relationships, Truths, Exes
“Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.”
— Miranda July, The First Bad Man: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Living, humanity, The Human Condition
“What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse.”
— Miranda July, The First Bad Man: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Affairs, Improbable Love
“We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything.”
— Miranda July, The First Bad Man: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Falling In Love, Relationships
“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”
— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories
Tagged: Life, Difficulty, Struggle, Love
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Love, Loving People, Future, Life, Confusion, Change
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Love, Co-dependency, Relationships, Exes, Ex-Lovers
“We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”
— Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls
Tagged: Love, Addiction, Relationships
“It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Paradise, Hell, Torture, Being Stuck, Love
“I don't think there are people crueler to one another more than people who really, really love each other. They see so much of themselves in one another that they simply cannot stand it and retaliate in all the same ways they are rejecting themselves!”
— Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think
Tagged: Love, Blame, Relationships, Cruelty
“The people who could not love us back were never meant to.”
— Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think
Tagged: Love, Unrequited Love, Heartbreak, Destiny
“We have all hurt someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. We have all loved someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. It is an intrinsic human trait, and a deep responsibility, I think, to be an organ and a blade. But, learning to forgive ourselves and others because we have not chosen wisely is what makes us most human. We make horrible mistakes. It’s how we learn. We breathe love. It’s how we learn. And it is inevitable.”
— Nayyirah Waheed, Warsan Shire, Kept Honey
Tagged: Pain, Love, Mistakes, Making Mistakes, hurt, Hurting Others, Human Nature, humanity