Love, like life, is complicated. We love talking about the good parts – the fluttery feelings, the sparks, and the grand romantic gestures. But, for many of us, love had another side, too: troubled relationships, heartbreaks, and harsh reality checks that left us reeling. This article is all about that shadowy side of love, with 80 dark yet insightful quotes that encapsulate these difficult experiences.
As you read these quotes, some may resonate deeply, pulling at your heartstrings. But keep in mind that it is often the difficult times that teach us the most about love and help us grow. So, let’s dive into these dark quotes about love, and come out the other side stronger, and perhaps, a little wiser.
1. “Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
2. “I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six
3. “Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.”
― Stephen King, The Body
4. “When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn’t make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. “It’s all right” we whisper, “I’m here, I love you.” and we lie: “I’ll never leave you.” For just a moment or two the darkness doesn’t seem so bad.”
― Neil Gaiman, Midnight Days
5. “Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
6. “Tell me every terrible thing you ever did, and let me love you anyway.”
― Sade Andria Zabala, Coffee and Cigarettes
7. “The heart is a different animal. A caged, lonely scavenger that feeds on its own wounds. Its scars never heal, because you can’t mend the very thing it needs to survive. So the wound continues to fester, until what’s left of the organ is eventually consumed by its own self-mutilation.”
― Keri Lake, Master of Salt & Bones
8. “That’s what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Chemical insanity, celebrated by poets.”
― Tess Gerritsen, Last to Die
9. “You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
10. “Longed for him. Got him. sh*t.”
― Margaret Atwood
11. “Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
12. “I am more of a beast than human,
more drunk than sober,
more of anarchy than order,
more of a scoundrel than a saint
more of a fallen than an angel,
but she loved all of my darkness,
so I gave her what’s left of my light.”
―Daniel Saint
13. “Light is easy to love. Show me your darkness.”
― R.Queen, Darkchylde
14. “Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God
15. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
16. “Because it seems like a lot of hassle, liking someone. Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts
17. “I will not have you without the darkness that hides within you. I will not let you have me without the madness that makes me. If our demons cannot dance, neither can we.”
― Nikita Gill
18. “The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
19. “I didn’t need to die for him to kill me.”
― Marieke Nijkamp, This Is Where It Ends
20. “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow
21. “Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares.”
― Aman Jassal, Rainbow – the shades of love
22. “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
23. “It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks
24. “Don’t break my heart. Crush it. Destroy it. Let me wallow it until I feel hollow in it. I’ll bash in the pain. I’ll scream your name and then one day I suddenly won’t.”
― Dominic Riccitello
25. “She lay in the dark and knew everything.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement
26. “If you wanted, I would burn down the world for you.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Love
27. “I’m going to hell. I’m pretty sure she’d drag me there herself.”
― Penelope Douglas, Punk 57
28. “This is my confession.
As dark as I am,
I will always
find enough light
to adore you to pieces,
with all my pieces.”
— Johnny Nguyen
29. “Together, we are madness. And there is music in madness, and madness in love. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us. Because we’re the composers, the conductors of our own fate, and we write the notes to a beautiful, dark melody that no one else can hear.”
― Keri Lake, Master of Salt & Bones
30. “He was her dark fairytale and she was his twisted fantasy. Together they made magic.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. “You know that place between nightmares and dreams? The place where tomorrows never come and yesterdays don’t hurt anymore? The place where your heart beats in sync with mine? The place where time doesn’t exist, and it’s easy to breathe? I want to live there with you.”
― Brittainy C. Cherry, The Air He Breathes
32. “Love, the hugest liar in this universe.”
― Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
33. “Who knew love could kill you?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
34. “We are all searching for someone whose demons play well with ours.”
― Heidi R. Kling
35. “I don’t need you to light up my world, just sit with me in the dark.”
― Unknown
36. “Love is as strong as death, as hard as hell.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
37. “Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it’s true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn’t fade and the scars don’t heal, and it’s too damned late.”
― Jonathan Tropper, The Book of Joe
38. “Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
39. “I never wanted a quiet, sensible sort of love. I wanted to be devoured.”
― Beau Taplin
40. “The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
41. “I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like a living thread.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
42. “It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Little Star
43. “When you are falling in love it is always already too late: dēute, as the poets say.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
44. “I am girl overboard.
But you do make drowning fun.”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Swan Wreck
45. “No love is fully requited. No love is equal. No love is fair. There is always one side that loves more. And you better not be that side—because it suffers.”
― L.J. Shen, The Kiss Thief
46. “I loved her when I hated her. And I loved her when I didn’t want anything to do with her. I was so crazy about her, the lines had blurred together. Feelings were mixed, emotions twisted together.”
― L.J. Shen, Vicious
47. “Love is a knife that cuts out your heart piece by piece, feeding it to the boy you love.”
― Ilsa Madden-Mills, Dirty English
48. “I am a moth to his flame, and he never hesitates to burn me.”
― Anna Todd, After
49. “You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire
50. “We were doomed from the start. A lost cause. A losing battle. And yet, in that narrow instant, I didn’t give a single f―k.”
― Julie Johnson, Erasing Faith
51. “Love is the most expensive thing you’ll ever own. You pay for it with grief, tears, and a piece of your soul.”
― Parker S. Huntington, Devious Lies
52. “Love isn’t always pretty. Sometimes you spend all your time hoping it’ll eventually be something different. Something better. Then, before you know it, you’re back to square one, and you lost your heart somewhere along the way.”
― Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love
53. “I love her, more than anyone should love anything. The kind of love that either fills you up or eats away at you. I love her at my own risk. I love her… dangerously. ”
― Karina Halle, And With Madness Comes the Light
54. “The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty’s dead.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
55. “Now do you understand why I’m interested in you? You’re a locked door, sweetheart. You give no one a key and you never answer the door when anyone knocks… Ah, but sometimes, sometimes I get a peek through the keyhole and what I find there… It’s like glimpsing you as you’re stripping. Underneath all of that darkness is something hungry, something desperate, something, oh, so deliciously vulnerable.”
― Tricia Owens, Fearless Leader
56. “Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth
57. “Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
58. “I’ve been dancing with the devil; I love that he pretends to care.”
― Unknown
59. “I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
60. “You like him because he’s a lost boy. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.”
― David Levithan, Every Day
61. “You will always fall in love, and it will alway s be like having your throat cut, just that fast.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
62. “A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
63. “Hate will keep you alive where love fails.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
64. “If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things
65. “They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.”
― Jandy Nelson, I’ll Give You the Sun
66. “There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
67. “There are plenty of ways to die, but only love can kill and keep you alive to feel it.”
— Leo Christopher
68. “The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty
69. “The great poets are full of bulls―t. Love has nothing on hatred’s capacity to give a man purpose.”
― Luke Scull, Sword of the North
70. “He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
71. “We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
72. “You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
73. “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
74. “When your dark clouds roll in
and I hear your thunder rumble,
I promise, I won’t run for cover.
I’ll hold you, and slow dance
with you in the rain.”
― Onur Taskiran
75. “Don’t ever try to get inside my head. It’s too dark for you.”
― Unknown
76. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski
77. Loving you was
the most
exquisite form
of self-destruction.
― Unknown
78. “I am going to hurt you.
You are going to hurt me.
But we will do it with practiced fingers
and passionate mouths
and I swear to God
it will be worth something.”
― Trista Mateer
79. “My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
80. “You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love
silence and darkness.”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
81. “Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.”
― Richard Siken
82. “Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
83. “I’ll love you to ruins.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Retribution of Mara Dyer
SIDE NOTE: While lists of sad love quotes, short romantic quotes, grief quotes, and healing quotes can help you work through your emotions, it’s important to remember that if you need help coping with challenging moments, you can always reach out to a professional.
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