Doomed Love Quotes

“I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“if she had not been a gypsy, and if he had not been a priest”
― Victor Hugo

“He offered his love ... she could not bother,
She gives her love to the other! The other!”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Phantom Phantasia: Poetry for the Phantom of the Opera Phan

“She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I want to let you go and at the same time ask you not to forget me.
I want both of us to move on but not forgetting each other completely.
Is this the right thing to wish for when
we can't be together?
Our feelings are strong yet not enough
for us to feel closer
I'm not yours and you're not mine, then what are we?
I hope we both could find the right answer to our fate's mystery.”
― Miss Rainbow Moonfire

“I always saw her. I knew her better than anyone. So if my colleague is right and we’re doomed to write what we know, then I’ve condemned myself to a thousand lifetimes with this woman, because for me, there’s never been anyone else.”
― Nenia Campbell, Little Deaths

“She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“He didn't believe they could kiss. He believed in doomed love and unhappily ever after.”
― Stephanie Garber, A Curse for True Love

“The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hayfield; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim.”
― Edith Wharton

“I've felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“He was going to destroy her. He nearly had before, but his vanity and his egocentrism had rendered him too myopic to truly see into the heart of her and do the damage that he'd craved. This time, she would not escape unscathed; he was going to make her suffer and do it so well that she might even grow to crave it—until it sent her plummeting. Until it left her broken and bleeding.

Until he ripped her heart out.”
― Nenia Campbell, Quid Pro Quo

“And yet it's probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile

“At present, the ottoman was occupied by a pair of cats who eyed Alex with blasé effeteness. He stuck his hands in his pockets and eyed them back.
"Romeo and Juliet," she told him. "They used to be lovers, but since that visit to the vet they're just friends."
"Are they friendly?" he asked, stretching out a hand at Romeo's funny pushed-in face.
"They're cats," she said, grinning as Romeo turned up his nose at the outstretched hand. Juliet wasn't interested, either. They poured themselves off the furniture, then minced away.
"I think they've been talking to your friends at the restaurant," Alex said.
"They don't talk to anyone." She saw him glance at the terrarium on the windowsill. "The turtles are Tristan and Isolde, and their offspring are Heloise and Abelard."
"So where are Cleopatra and Mark Antony?" he asked.
"In a tomb in Egypt, I imagine. But you can look in the fish tank and see Bonnie and Clyde, Napoleon and Josephine, and Jane and Guildford."
He bent and peered into the lighted tank. "Fun couples. Is it a coincidence that they all ended tragically?"
"Not a coincidence, just poor judgment."
"Isn't it bad karma, naming your pets after doomed lovers?"
"I don't think they care.”
― Susan Wiggs, Summer by the Sea

“Please don't love me like this, she thought. Please not like this. But just the same she could not bear for him to step away from her. To abandon her, cold and used and foolish. Or worse; to leave her heartbroken and forever mourning this delicate moment between them, with all of its promise of what could have been if they weren't doomed from the start.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Sooner or later', she said,' our true nature separates us from the person we love. Losing one's shadow shouldn't be a tragedy but a goal. It's the only way of finding out who we really are.”
― Bernardo Esquinca, The Secret Life of Insects

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! -
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce
than with honesty?
HAMLET: Ay, truly. For the power of beauty will sooner
transform honesty from what it is to a bawd
than the force of honesty can translate beauty
into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox,
but now the time gives it proof. I did love
you once.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET: You should not have believed me. For
virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock
but we shall relish of it. I love you not.
OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool.
For wise men know well enough what monsters you
make of them.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
HAMLET: Do you think I mean country matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That's a fair thought - to lie between maids' legs.
OPHELIA: What is, my lord?
HAMLET: Nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“HAMLET: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
OPHELIA: 'Tis brief, my lord.
HAMLET: As woman's love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“She speaks much of her father: says she hears
There's tricks i'th'world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing.
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed, would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow. Your sister's drowned, Laertes.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them.
There on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“HAMLET: I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet