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44 quotes, dealt in a fresh order every day, so the page reads differently each morning, and every quote keeps its own page.

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First Love Quotes — 44 First Love Quotes, Each Checked to Its Source

Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once.

Jerome K. Jerome · The opening of his essay on being in love.

Young love-making, that gossamer web! The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

George Eliot · The narrator on Lydgate and Rosamond falling in love in Middlemarch, chapter 36, 1871.

No young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared.

Jane Austen · The narrator's mock serious maxim after Catherine Morland first dances with Henry Tilney, in Northanger Abbey, chapter 3.

Love is a great beautifier.

Louisa May Alcott · The source reads: “...and grown prettier than ever, for love is a great beautifier.” · The narrator on Meg March, grown prettier during her long engagement to John Brooke, in Little Women, Part 2, chapter 24, Gossip.

In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Alfred Tennyson · From the poem of a jilted lover, one line that outlived the rest.

I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen.

Lloyd Dobler · John Cusack's kickboxing romantic in Say Anything (1989) · The source reads: “She gave me a pen. I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen.” · Lloyd to his sister after Diane Court breaks up with him in the car and hands him a pen so he can write to her.

I was in love with loving.

Saint Augustine · On his student years in Carthage.

There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love.

Anne Carson · From her study of desire in the Greek poets.

But to see her was to love her, love but her, and love for ever.

Robert Burns · From "Ae Fond Kiss," his farewell to Agnes Maclehose, sent in a letter of December 1791.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

George Bernard Shaw · Father Keegan in the play Shaw wrote about Ireland.

I think, Kitty, that true love may be developing in the Annex.

Anne Frank · Anne to her diary, Kitty, about Peter van Pels, entry of March 22, 1944, in The Diary of a Young Girl, Definitive Edition.

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

John Green · The source reads: “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” · Hazel Grace Lancaster as Augustus reads to her, chapter 7 of The Fault in Our Stars, 2012.

When first we fall in love, we feel that we know all there is to know about life, and perhaps we are right.

Mignon McLaughlin · An aphorism from The Neurotic's Notebook, chapter 1, 1963; Quote Investigator has traced it to this book.

Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books; but love from love, toward school with heavy looks.

William Shakespeare · Romeo leaving Juliet's balcony at dawn.

The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone.

Jane Austen · Laura's account of meeting Edward in the comic novel Austen wrote at fourteen, which mocks the swooning heroines of her day; the line is now quoted with a straight face.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Attributed to John Updike · Quoted everywhere under the novelist's name, but no novel, essay or interview of his has been found for it.

I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends, and you!

L. M. Montgomery · Gilbert Blythe to Anne Shirley as he finally wins her, in Anne of the Island, chapter 41, 1915.

I shall see her today! And then I have no further wish to form; all, all is included in that one thought.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · The source reads: “To-day I shall see her ... I shall see her, and I have no other wish to form for the whole day: all, all is included in that thought.” · Werther on waking with the thought of Charlotte, in the letter of July 19 in The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774.

I saw and loved.

Edward Gibbon · The historian on meeting Suzanne Curchod at twenty, whom his father forbade him to marry.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness.

Victor Hugo · The source reads: “Strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness.” · The narrator on Marius and Cosette in Les Misérables, Part 4, Book 3, chapter 6, in Isabel Hapgood's 1887 translation.

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will.

Stendhal · The source reads: “Love is like the fever, it is born and spends itself without the slightest intervention of the will.” · From chapter 5 of Stendhal's essay On Love, 1822, on how love is born without our consent.

"Make a wish." "It already came true."

Samantha Baker · Molly Ringwald's forgotten birthday girl in Sixteen Candles (1984) · Samantha to Jake Ryan over her birthday cake in the final scene, when he tells her to blow out the candles.

The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light; the other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness.

Leo Tolstoy · Prince Andrei confiding to Pierre that he loves Natasha, in War and Peace, Book 6, chapter 22, in the Maude translation.

I had ceased now to be simply a young boy; I was in love.

Ivan Turgenev · The sixteen-year-old narrator Vladimir on the day his passion for Zinaida began; the next sentence adds that his sufferings dated from the same day. Constance Garnett's translation is the standard English wording.

First Love Quotes