This post contains all the best Edgar Allan Poe quotes about love and, based on the writer’s devotion to the macabre, they are bound to make you think beyond the words themselves.
Edgar Allan Poe was a true genius — an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who lived from 1809 to 1849, and died under mysterious conditions. He is best known for his poetry (including “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”) and fiction short stories (including “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”), which you were most often filled with mystery and macabre.
For this reason, this post is unlike other literary love quotes. Rather, while some are deep and lovely, others are downright dark — like the one discussing the narrator’s “love” of the man he kills in “The Tell-Tale Heart. Like me, you probably read this classic in school.
Several of his works can be found on the full list of books mentioned on the Gilmore Girls, and they always remind me of The Edgar Allen Poe Society featured on the show!
Best Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Love
Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous quote about love is from the poem “Annabel Lee”: “We loved with a love that was more than love[.]” It is often quoted and referenced to this day.
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More Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Love
“But we loved with a love that was more than love— / I and my Annabel Lee— / With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven / Coveted her and me.”
“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
“Thy grace, thy more than beauty, / Shall be an endless theme of praise, / And love—a simple duty.”
“Yes, I now feel that it was then on that evening of sweet dreams—that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight half of anxiety.”
“For passionate love is still divine / I lov’d her as an angel might / With ray of the all living light / Which blazes upon Edis’ shrine.”
“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”
“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
“The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
“This maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me.”
“Deep in earth my love is lying/And I must weep alone.”
“Because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me.”
“In the Heaven’s above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of ‘Mother.”
“Love like mine can never be gotten over.”
“No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.”
“There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”
“O, human love! thou spirit given, / On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!”
“And so being young and dipt in folly / I fell in love with melancholy.”
“But our love it was stronger by far than the love / Of those who were older than we- / Of many far wiser than we- / And neither the angels in heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
“Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the alter, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream.”
“I have no words — alas! — to tell / The loveliness of loving well!”
“If passion it can properly be called, was of the most thoroughly romantic, shadowy, and imaginative character. It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love. It had no peculiar regard to the person, or to the character, or to the reciprocating affection… Any maiden, not immediately and positively repulsive[.]”
“Thou wast all that to me, love, / For which my soul did pine: / A green isle in the sea, love, / A fountain and a shrine / All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, / And all the flowers were mine.”
“We grew in age – and love – together / Roaming the forest, and the wild; / My breast her shield in wintry weather – / And, when the friendly sunshine smil’d, / And she would mark the opening skies, / I saw no Heaven – but in her eyes.”
“And I lie so composedly, Now in my bed (Knowing her love) That you fancy me dead— And I rest so contentedly, Now in my bed, (With her love at my breast) That you fancy me dead— That you shudder to look at me. Thinking me dead. But my heart it is brighter Than all of the many Stars in the sky, For it sparkles with Annie— It glows with the light Of the love of my Annie— With the thought of the light Of the eyes of my Annie.”
“Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life, / As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife / Of semblance with reality, which brings / To the delirious eye, more lovely things / Of Paradise and Love- and all our own! / Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.”
“He admitted but four elementary principles, or more strictly, conditions of bliss. That which he considered chief was (strange to say!) the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air. “The health,” he said, “attainable by other means is scarcely worth the name.” He instanced the ecstasies of the fox hunter, and pointed to the tillers of the earth, the only people who, as a class, can be fairly considered happier than others. His second condition was love of woman. His third, and most difficult of realization, was the contempt of ambition. His fourth was an object of unceasing pursuit; and he held that, other things being equal, the extent of attainable happiness was in proportion to the spirituality of this object.”
“I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire.”
Conclusion
Those are all the best (and truly unique) Edgar Allan Poe quotes about love. I hope the final one from The Tell-Tale Heart didn’t give you the chills!
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