Crazy Heart
"You were the hardest lesson I ever had to learn." - unknown.
In honor of my most hated holiday, I am doing something different. This post is lengthy and consists entirely of quotes that are not from me. Valentine's Day- a celebration of love, devotion, attraction, and longing- is meant to be shared with someone special. As a warning, the quotes you'll be reading today are not about that side of love. If you are in love or in love with the bright and shiny side of love, this post will not be to your liking.
The quotes featured are about the other side that is not celebrated. They are the brutal parts of love that, when reflected upon, make you realize that you will have to make a choice: do you let love destroy you, or do you choose to cherish it anyway? Your answer will shape your future. I will let you piece them together and make up your own story. I know that you will find a few that will pull on your heart. Enjoy-
"My current situation: I'm not in a relationship, it's just I am in love with someone I cannot unlove." - Thinkology.
"One day, whether you are 14, 28, or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find is that they are not always with whom we spend our lives." - Brenna Brown?
"In one lifetime you will love many times, but one love will burn your soul forever." - Word Porn.
"You were my greatest hello, my saddest goodbye, and the biggest what if I will question all of my life." - Stephanie Bennett-Henry.
"I met you when I was not looking for you and lost you when I loved you the most." - unknown.
"I found you only to lose you to reality."- please don't forget me| S.B.
"I will always love the false image I had of you." - Ashleigh Brilliant.
"I'll borrow of imagination what reality will not give me." - Charlotte Bronte, Shirley
"You can't just come into someone's life, make them feel special, and then leave." - unknown.
"I'm not mad that you didn't want me, I'm mad because you acted like you did. You made me fall for you and left me like I meant nothing to you. That broke my heart." - unknown.
"I really wanted it to be you. I so badly wanted it to be you until I understood, you didn't want it to be me." - d.c.
"I'm trying to forget you, but I'm also waiting for you to come back." - unknown.
"I spent months moving on, and one small thing that brings me back to square one every time." - (via heartful-perspective).
"Long after I have given up, my heart still searches for you without my permission." - unknown.
"I am a woman who talks to herself and lies." - Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
"Sometimes I can find peace with you leaving, accepting that this wasn't meant for me. Other nights I'm bargaining with God, asking him what I have to do or give up for him to bring you back." - unknown.
"You don't need to know why they did what they did. Just know that it wasn't an accident." - unbreakable and uplifting.
"You don't know how deeply you are intertwined with someone until you try to walk away from them." - M.I.
"I envy you. Every moment you can leave me. I cannot leave myself." - Anna Swir.
"He was never mine, but losing him broke my heart." - unknown.
"I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had." - The Wonder Years
"No, we didn't date. Technically, he wasn't an ex-boyfriend. But he was an ex-something, an ex-maybe. An ex-almost."
"You and I, always almost. Again and again. We were always on the verge of almost. Never nothing, never something."
"Though I never really had you... to me you will always be the one that got away." - Ranata Suzuki.
"You and I were always just a daydream I took too far." - I Can Love You, But I Can't Have You.
"You are mine even though you are not. You still, secretly, are a part of me, always." - j.w.
But I am very homesick for arms that have never held me.
"And I? I wanted to dive into you like water, to press my face to your shoulder and vanish like sugar into tea." - unknown.
"I think about 'us' a lot, even though 'us' doesn't exist." - sadquoteshere on Instagram.
"I think about us a lot. I don't know if it's the end of the chapter and you'll return later on, or it's the end of the story, but I love you. I miss you. And I'm sorry this is the way it became." - unknown.
"I am not right for you, though I think about it all the time." - Joshua Beckman, About the Days, Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press, 2001).
"I hope I cross your mind once in a while just so that I won't feel pathetic for thinking of you all the time." - unknown.
"I keep remembering- I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me." - Henri Barbusse, from The Inferno, 1918
"So we ignore each other and pretend the other person doesn't exist. but deep down, we both know it wasn't supposed to end like this." - unknown.
"We should learn to trust in chance encounters. Two people meet only when both of them have an immense need to find the other." - Paulo Coelho.
"I don't understand why destiny would let us meet, knowing that we could never be together." - unknown.
"Honest feelings and bad timing make the most painful combinations." - via Quotes'nd Notes
"Sometimes, the love OF your life is not the love IN your life. You belong to one another, but aren't each other's. If that doesn't awaken some sort of madness inside a person, I don't know what would." - Ali Cri.
"Love that we cannot have is the one that lasts the longest, hurts the deepest, and feels the strongest." - unknown.
"I know I'll always think of you with something like hurt and nostalgia- and a great deal of love." -
"It's strange. I felt less lonely when I didn't know you." - Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies
"I hold you in the safest place I keep. Somewhere between memories and scars." - Nicole Lyons.
"You'll always be mine, in the back of my mind... I'll look for you first in my next life."
"Sometimes God will harden a person's heart towards you to give you an exit. Sometimes we can get so tied up in a person, God himself has to cut the cord." - God's Armour.
"When someone is not meant for you, the universe will trigger them to mess up, like hurt or disappoint you, until you get the message to release them." - unknown.
"I love him. I want him to stay away from me." - mar-seille
My final act of love is leaving you alone.
"I would've spent the rest of my life loving him. I'm grateful he didn't allow me to." - HC.
"It's hard to wait for something you know might never happen, but it's even harder to give up when you know it's everything you want." - unknown.
"You are my paradox. You are the love letter that I can't read anymore. The same one I refuse to throw away." JmStorm.
"Love is giving someone the power to destroy you and trusting them not to." - unknown.
"And I knew it. That's the worst part: I knew it." - Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover
"When someone makes you the happiest person and the saddest person at the same time, that's when it's real. That's when it's worth something." - unknown.
"Maybe it was too much. Maybe it wasn't enough. But I will never forget the way you made me feel, like I was everything. And I will never forget the way you made me feel like I was nothing." - Antonio M Arce.
"You know you really love someone, when you don't hate them for breaking your heart." - unknown.
"I don't hate you, I never could, I hate how you made me fall for you, when you knew you had no intentions of catching me." - unknown.
"There's always that one special person that no matter what they've done to you, you still just can't let them go." - unknown
"Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back... then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else." - Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly.
"They say the heart is a muscle which is to say its strength relies on how much you use it, which is to say that to risk loving deeply is the most powerful thing you will ever do." - Nikita Gill
"You could break my heart into tiny little pieces, and I'd still pick them up and put them back in your hands." - unknown.
"When I am six feet under, and the bugs are eating my heart, all they taste is you." - unknown.
"Love is when you shed a tear and still want him, it's when he ignores you, and you still love him, it's when he loves another girl, but you still smile and say I'm happy for you, when all you really do is cry." - unknown.
"It was real for me. I don't know what it was for you. But for me. It was real. It meant more than it should have. I was willing to be with you forever. And that's what hurts the most." - r.m. drake.
"We went through all that to be strangers again." - Lil Baby.
"The greatest tragedy a soul can endure is to connect with another... and then be left alone once more. It's like being invisible your whole life and finally finding someone who can see you and hear you, just so they can look you in the eyes and say 'goodbye'." - Ranata Suzuki
"Sometimes we aren't meant to get over someone, and we go on living a little bit emptier." - Leo Christopher.
"We all have someone we never speak of. Someone who meant so much that even breathing their name makes your soul tremble with memories and pain."- Nikita Gill.
"I don't think I've hated something so much as me wanting you." - Jasmine Gibson, from "Hot-Hand Fallacy"
"Can we start over? Can we be strangers again? Let me introduce myself. We can laugh and talk, and relearn what we already know, and come up with new inside jokes, and create new memories, and give each other a second chance." - unknown.
"Maybe one day, we'll meet again and explain to each other what really happened. Maybe one day we'll finally understand. Until then, I hope you live your best life, and I hope you really do all things you always wanted to do." - Word Porn.
"Perhaps one day we will meet again as characters in a different story, maybe we'll share a lifetime then." - pavana.
"Maybe we'll meet again when we're slightly older. I'll be right for you and you'll be right for me, but right now, I am chaos to your thoughts, and you are poison to my heart." - unknown.
"Maybe in another life we are cleaning the dishes together, laughing about how we almost gave up on each other." - unknown.
"I am silently hoping that time has made a mistake and has already reserved a moment for us to find each other again." - S.L. Gray.
" I hope one day we can forgive each other for not being what we wanted each other to be." - unknown.
"There's a thin line between memory and haunting, and I walk it every night." - unknown.
"I can't stop loving you. Believe me, I tried. I lie awake every night, trying to think of new ways to get you off my mind. But I fail every time." - Nevermore My Love
"My head is telling me to forget you ever existed but my heart is telling me to hold on for dear life and never let you go, and I have no fucking idea which to listen to anymore." -HPLYRIKZ.COM
"We leave doors open for people who'll never knock again. Stubborn human heart. Living for the maybes and what ifs. Hoping until the day it dies." -
"You didn't say goodbye, and a part of me believes that means you're coming back." -
My memory loves you; it asks about you all the time." - Jonathan Carroll.
"I miss you more than I remember you."- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, (Penguin, 2019).
"I won't ever forget you, and maybe that is the only forever the two of us together were ever meant to have." - S.L Gray.
"How do you tell someone that the reason you're sad is because you love them?" - You'll stop replying soon anyway. j.e.o.
"And when I asked you how you'd been. I meant I missed you more than I've ever missed anything before." - unknown.
"I've learned to miss you, quietly. More than you'll ever know." - J.Lynn.
"I think I'll miss you for a really long time. No matter how easily distracted I am, I think I will always find a split second to think of you." - visualizetracy | loveqns.com
"I loved my friend. He went away from me. There's nothing more to say. The poem ends, soft as it began- I loved my friend." -
"I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here." - Octavio Paz, from The Prisoner.
"I wonder whose arms would I run and fall into if I were drunk in a room with everyone I have ever loved." - this becomes almost deeper when you think of non-romantic loves too (via Bl-ossomed).
"He is my heart, and I suffer." - Andal, tr. by A.K. Ramanujan, from "Noisy Among the Shenbaka Flowers".
"When I die, mix my ashes with ink and write of how I loved him." - AjWs
"The hardest part about walking away from someone is the part where you realize that, no matter how slowly you go, they will never run after you."
"I wanted to ask you what I mean to you, but I'm afraid to know the answer." -
"And there's nothing that I can do, except bury my love for you." - unknown.
"I'm scared of the love I have for you. Because I know it will ruin me. And I also know that I will let it." - unknown.
"Don't pretend like this didn't mean anything to you. I was there. I saw the way you looked at me." - unknown.
"I thought maybe it meant something to you, too. You looked in my eyes like you were searching for something, and I wanted you to find it." -
"How you looked at me that one night, those 4 seconds, I'll remember for the rest of my life." - Deanna Vincent.
"Our eyes had the most devilish affair; Meeting in secrecy in a room full of people.
"If I gotta be hard to be around you, then we don't belong in each other's presence. Tough skin is for tough environments. I belong in the spaces where it's safe to be soft." - unknown.
"You're not just picking a partner- you're picking how you'll feel about yourself. Your partner is a declaration of what you believe you deserve." -Jillian Turecki.
"Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it." - James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
"But you MUST break this fixation on love as the cure to all of your ills. If you found love right now, you would run it straight into the ground in seconds." - unknown
"I almost thanked you for teaching me something about survival back there, but then I remembered that the ocean never handed me the gift of swimming. I gave it to myself." -
Every quote in this piece was written by someone else, but every feeling was once mine. Some words have authors, others have only echoes. Love—especially the kind that never quite becomes a life—often resists clean endings and clear ownership. These fragments are offered as they came to me: unfinished, unresolved, and still beating. These words are borrowed, but the heart they describe is not.
Love and Hope,
Big Sky Baby