One of the reasons to love Romance Novel Month is that it provides the perfect occasion to swoon. Swoon? You might be thinking. What are we, in a nineteenth-century novel? Someone get this writer a fainting couch. And one of the quickest ways to get all worked up: reading swoonworthy quotes from romance novels.
As a point of fact, I have always loved fainting couches, and I have always been drawn to dramatic — okay, overdramatic, even — declarations of love. That scene in Say Anything where John Cusack's character holds the boombox overhead? Gets me every time. Billy Crystal's declaration of love at the end of When Harry Met Sally ... I can recite it by heart. ("I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.")
The best twitterpating quotes from romance novels give me that same goosebumpy thrill (it's called frisson, what Salon deemed "an orgasm for the skin"). These are quotes that express the power of love, the hurts-so-good-feeling of yearning, the ache of crushing, the unspeakable quality of intimacy. Somehow, these authors have put into words those messy, overwhelming emotions that are hardest for us to articulate. They help us voice our own feelings, of course. But they also sweep us away, off our feet and over the moon. Get to the nearest couch: these 12 quotes will make you swoon.
1. “You don't love people at their best, sweetheart. You just love them because you can't help it.”
― Amy Lane, Keeping Promise Rock
2. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope ... I have loved none but you.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion
3. “Love helped me live life instead of just survive it.”
― Rebecca Donovan, Reason To Breathe
4. “Wherever you are is exactly where I want to be. I’ve wasted too much time already. I don’t want to waste another single day without you.”
― Kindle Alexander, Double Full
5. “You can look back now and see how you should have known, but you were focusing on the facts instead of the feeling.”
― Jessica Park, Flat-Out Love
6. “I'd sell my soul to have you. In my whole life, you'll always be what I wanted most.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
7. “Nobody in my life has ever known me the way you do. Nobody in my life has ever made me feel as good as you do. You know me, you know everything about me, and when you leave me, you're going to be leaving the real me, the me nobody else has ever seen, that's who you're going to be rejecting.”
― Jennifer Cruise, Bet Me
8. “A knight in tarnished armor is still a knight.”
― Emma Chase, Sustained (The Legal Briefs Series)
9. “He was wooing me. And I was letting him woo. I wanted the woo. I deserved the woo. I needed the wow that would surely follow the woo, but for now, the woo? It was whoa.”
― Alice Clayton, Wallbanger (Cocktail, #1)
10. “Somethings in life are out of your control. you can make it a party or a tragedy. Or, you could refuse to take the next step. You could refuse to take what you wanted most because you're afraid some day you might lose it.”
― Nora Roberts, Vision in White
11. “I give you forever, the least you can give me is everything.”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Saint
12. “For a shy girl unused to men, it is easier to hurl the moon from the sky than it is to turn away from a man who truly wishes to pursue her.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare
Images: Touchstone Pictures; Giphy (13)
