52 incredibly romantic and not [too] cheesy love quotes

Nothing de-cheeses romantic books like a plastic dinosaur. Photograph by Leah Renee Photography

Like many an offbeat bride before me, when I got engaged I began a long and agitating search for love quotes that did not make me throw up in my mouth. I searched many websites, bought quote books, and compiled lists of quotes I sort of liked. I found loads of them. Boatloads. Metric fuckloads. But some I had read so many times on so many websites that I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for them at all. Like the one about "gazing at the stars in the same direction" — it's very pretty, it's cute, but it didn't hit the romantic sweet spot for me.

So, I culled my quotes file and nailed down fifty-two bad-ass quotes that I adore and that I'm sharing with you now. I used most of these on our wedding favors. A few of these are old favorites of Offbeat Bride, but a lot of them I've never seen on a wedding site. So enjoy and begin compiling and culling your own metric fuckload of quotes!

"True love is the greatest thing, in the world-except for a nice MLT — mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe." -The Princess Bride

"Love makes you do the wacky." -Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"Happiness is anyone and anything at all, that's loved by you." -You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown

"As You Wish." -The Princess Bride

"And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course." -Khalil Gibran's The Prophet

"Like you're trying to fight gravity
on a planet that insists
that love is like falling
and falling is like this"
-Ani Difranco's Falling Is Like This

"'cause I know there is strength
in the differences between us
and I know there is comfort
where we overlap"
-Ani Difranco's Overlap

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." -Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (and yes, Matthew 6:21, too)

"Who, being loved, is poor?" -Oscar Wilde

"Better never to have met you in my dream than to wake and reach for hands that are not there." -Otomo No Yakamochi

"I love your feet
because they have
wandered over
the earth and through
the wind and water
until they brought
you to me."
-unknown

"I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life. " -Rita Rudner

"I love you. You annoy me more than I ever thought possible, but… I want to spend every irritating minute with you." -Scrubs

"If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus one day, so I never have to live without you. " -Ernest H. Shephard (this is often erroneously attributed to A.A. Milne, but he never wrote these words)

"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet… I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.'" -Shall We Dance?

"The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along." -The Essential Rumi

"I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself but for what you are making of me." -Roy Croft

"I love you right up to the moon — and back." -Sam McBratney's Guess How Much I Love You

"We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love." -Robert Fulghum

"When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." -When Harry Met Sally

"I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone." -Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring

"No, I mean I like you very much. Just as you are." -Bridget Jones Diary

"One plus one equals both." -Gregory Maguire's Son of a Witch

"Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts." -Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet

"No. No, you can't… STOP. Please don't go away. Please? No one's ever stuck with me for so long before. And if you leave… if you leave… I just, I remember things better with you. I do, look. P. Sherman, forty-two… forty-two… I remember it, I do. It's there, I know it is, because when I look at you, I can feel it. And-and I look at you, and I… and I'm home. Please… I don't want that to go away. I don't want to forget." -Finding Nemo

"You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones." -Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time

"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love." -Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything." -Katharine Hepburn

"There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread." -Mother Teresa

"What will survive of us is love." -Phillip Larkin's An Arundel Tomb

"What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us." -Helen Keller

"Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame." -Henry David Thoreau

"To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness." -Robert Brault

"You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough." -George Moore

"We loved with a love that was more than love." -Edgar Allan Poe's Annabell Lee

"Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new." -Ursula K. Le Guin

"He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began." -Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

"Love me and the world is mine." -David Reed

"You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams." -Dr. Seuss

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." -Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

"Love is like a friendship caught on fire." -Jeremy Taylor

"True love stories never have endings." -Richard Bach

"Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold." -Zelda Fitzgerald

"I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion — I have shudder'd at it — I shudder no more — I could be martyr'd for my Religion — Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you." -John Keats

"My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet." -John Keats

"I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone." -Javan

"Tell me who admires you and loves you, and I will tell you who you are." -Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

"The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other. And if it's half of what we felt — that's everything." Guess Who's Coming to Dinner