Broken Heart quotes

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

The phrase holds affection and pain together: separation hurts precisely because the relationship being left is valued.

Source note: Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2; Juliet speaks as the lovers part for the night.

“For grief indeed is love and grief beside.”

The sonnet treats grief as attachment plus the pain attached to what has been lost, refusing to separate sorrow cleanly from love.

Source note: Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet XXXV; Project Gutenberg #2002. The statement is part of an intimate love sonnet shaped by earlier bereavements.

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Love is described as complicated rather than frictionless, which makes the line a durable reminder against idealizing relationships.

Source note: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 1; Lysander says this to Hermia while describing the obstacles that repeatedly frustrate lovers. It is character dialogue inside their threatened relationship.

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.”

Wentworth’s letter holds pain and possibility together: the renewed declaration is intense because he still does not know whether Anne’s feelings have survived their long separation.

Source note: Persuasion, Chapter XXIII, Project Gutenberg #105. Captain Frederick Wentworth writes the line to Anne Elliot while listening to her conversation with Captain Harville; the letter is signed “F. W.” and is fictional character writing, not Austen autobiography.

“I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”

The line combines joy with humility: Wentworth recognizes that his renewed happiness exceeds what his earlier pride and mistakes make him feel he has earned.

Source note: Persuasion, Chapter XXIII.

“Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.”

Romantic love is compared to an unavoidable childhood illness, making intense emotion comic by treating it as something people catch, endure, and eventually recover from.

Source note: The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “On Being in Love”; the comparison opens the essay’s mock-medical treatment of romance.

“You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.”

Absence becomes more painful as time continues, with the missed meeting represented not as a single moment but as a prolonged experience of disappointed expectation.

Source note: “A Broken Appointment,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem's speaker addresses an absent person; the line is retained as dramatic lyric context.

“Trust love even if it brings sorrow. Do not close up your heart.”

The advice refuses to make sorrow a reason for emotional withdrawal, presenting openness to love as worthwhile even when attachment can also bring pain.

Source note: The Gardener, poem 27; Project Gutenberg #6686. This is dialogue within a lyric sequence, and the surrounding exchange explicitly pairs love with tears and enduring sorrow.

“’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”

Love can remain worth having even when it ends in loss, because avoiding grief by avoiding attachment would also remove the relationship itself.

Source note: In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 27.

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”

Friendship is framed as practical emotional support when romantic hopes fail, without pretending it instantly removes disappointment.

Source note: Northanger Abbey.

“How great my grief, my joys how few, Since first it was my fate to know thee!”

The speaker measures a relationship by the imbalance between grief and joy, making recollection itself the structure through which attachment and loss are assessed.

Source note: “How Great My Grief,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. It is a dramatic lyric statement and is not automatically read as direct autobiography.

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!””

Whittier compresses regret into the imagined alternative life: both Maud and the Judge later measure their ordinary lives against a possibility neither chose when they briefly met.

Source note: “Maud Muller,” in The Works of Whittier, Volume I, Project Gutenberg #9567. The poem first shows both characters imagining the life they might have shared, then calls “It might have been” the saddest formulation before ending with a separate note of hope.

“And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

Separation can expose the depth of attachment that ordinary familiarity concealed, making loss a painful measure of how much the bond mattered.

Source note: The Prophet, “On Love.”

“When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself. And one ends by deceiving others.”

The line turns romance into a two-stage comedy of self-deception and social deception, exaggerating cynicism to expose how desire distorts judgment.

Source note: A Woman of No Importance, Act III; Lord Illingworth answers Gerald’s question about love with the romance/self-deception epigram. The exact catalog wording is supported by this play, not by The Picture of Dorian Gray.

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

Jealousy is described as self-consuming because it feeds on suspicion while tormenting the person who carries it.

Source note: Othello, Act 3, Scene 3.

“Snow-bound in woodland, a mournful word, Dropt now and then from the bill of a bird, Reached me on wind-wafts.”

A winter bird-call reaches the speaker inside a snowbound wood, giving a postponed meeting an atmosphere of distance, waiting and subdued natural sound.

Source note: “Postponement,” collected in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Project Gutenberg #3167. The poem's landscape frames a delayed relationship encounter and is not generic weather description.

“We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod.”

A drained winter landscape mirrors the emotional coldness of a failing relationship, with pale sun, dead leaves and barren ground shaping the poem's remembered scene.

Source note: “Neutral Tones,” collected in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Project Gutenberg #3167. Hardy's landscape is part of a dramatic lyric memory, not a claim that winter inherently causes sadness.

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

The narrator summarizes Anne’s development as a reversal: excessive caution shaped her early choice, while experience later teaches her to value warmer confidence and attachment.

Source note: Persuasion, Chapter IV, Project Gutenberg #105. This is narrator commentary after Anne reconsiders the engagement she ended at nineteen under Lady Russell’s persuasion.

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”

Anne claims endurance in love for women within a debate about constancy, but Austen gives the argument to a character in a particular social setting rather than presenting it as objective psychology about either sex.

Source note: Persuasion, Chapter XXIII, Project Gutenberg #105. Anne Elliot says this to Captain Harville after he describes men’s attachment to wives and families; the exchange immediately leads into Wentworth’s written declaration.

“Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves.”

The speaker remembers a painful relationship through the landscape that surrounded it, showing how later experience can fuse emotional lessons with particular natural images.

Source note: “Neutral Tones,” Wessex Poems and Other Verses; Project Gutenberg #3167. The statement belongs to the poem's speaker and should not be treated as Hardy's universal doctrine that love deceives.