22 Powerful Book Quotes On First Love

First love is a powerful experience. It feels like you're suddenly living in a dream and there's no possible way you can survive without this feeling or person at your side. It makes you crazy, it turns your world upside down over and over again, and it's something you wouldn't ever want to forget. For most people, first love, or love at first sight, doesn't always last, which is definitely OK. It could have been your first grade crush, high school sweetheart, or even your first relationship you had after college.

You can learn so much about yourself when you fall in love for the first time. Whether you've experienced it before or not, one way to continue experiencing the act of falling in love (metaphorically, of course), is through books. I adore stories about love, especially ones about first love in YA. It's all so exciting, new, and completely honest.

Some authors really know how to write about all the emotions and confusion first love brings, and I've piled together a list of those authors below. In case you're in the mood for some extra romantic quotes, here are 22 of the best book quotes on falling in love for the very first time:

1. And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter.

— Stephen Cbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

2. He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

3. "Maybe not," she said as we came to the car. "But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works."

― Sarah Dessen, That Summer

4. I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.

― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

5. There is never a time of place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.

— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

6. He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again — the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.

― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

7. In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

― Alice Hoffman, Local Girls

8. "When did you first fall in love?"

"I think, I first fell in love when I was in fifth grade with this boy who kept his glass ruler in the sunlight and made rainbows on my desk with it."

― Saiber, Stardust and Sheets

9. Holding Eleanor's hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.

— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor and Park

10. You are all at once the subject, object, predicate, preposition, and period of my thoughts.

― Daria Snadowsky, Anatomy of a Boyfriend

11. I fell for her in summer, my lovely summer girl,From summer she is made, my lovely summer girl,I’d love to spend a winter with my lovely summer girl,But I’m never warm enough for my lovely summer girl,It’s summer when she smiles, I’m laughing like a child,It’s the summer of our lives; we’ll contain it for a whileShe holds the heat, the breeze of summer in the circle of her handI’d be happy with this summer if it’s all we ever had.

― Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver

12. "All I do when we're apart is think about you, and all I when we're together is panic. Because every second feels so important. And because I'm so out of control, I can't help myself. I'm not even mine anymore, I'm yours, and what if you decide that you don't want me? How could you want me like I want you?"

He was quiet. He wanted everything she'd just said to be the last thing he heard. He wanted to fall asleep with "I want you" in his ears. "God," she said. "I told you I shouldn't talk. I didn't even answer your question."

― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

13. As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.

― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

14. I remember what it felt like to fall in love for the first time. You think you’ll never love like that again. But you do.

― Jenny Han, Ashes to Ashes

15. Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all.

― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

16. True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring—once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners. And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.

— Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

17. Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a house you've been in before — you will recognize the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the books on the shelves, the contents of drawers: You could find your way around in the dark if you had to.

— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

18. As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

19. They say your skin is the largest organ in your body, but I'd never really appreciated that before, the way his fingertips slowly tracing the curve of my jaw could travel down the entire length of my body, covering me in goose bumps. The way he could make me feel flushed with something that wasn't fever.

― Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means

20. He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

21. "In vain I have 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."

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

22. "It has made me better loving you ... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better."

— Henry James, A Portrait of a Lady

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