Dear, sweet love.

You’re truly a wonderful thing until something goes wrong. When things do go wrong, it can be tempting to say, “Screw you, love! Who needs you anyway?”

Hardly any of us can truthfully say we’ve never suffered a broken heart—even those who are currently in relationships and have been with a partner for years can probably remember that painful feeling of losing someone we thought would be in our lives forever.

The good news is, we can get through this. The vast majority of us will probably move onto better things. Someday, we may even look back at our failed relationships and see them as blessings in disguise or learning experiences.

Until then, it’s okay to feel sad, angry and cynical. Sometimes, there is even something to be said for finding comfort in the wit and wisdom of others who have loved and lost.

Therefore, without further ado, here are the some the best things ever said about lost love:

 

“Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?/ I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”

~ Frank O’Hara from “Meditations in an Emergency”

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

~ Neil Gaiman

“Better be left by twenty dears / Than lie in a love-less bed; / Better a loaf that’s wet with tears, / Than cold, unsalted bread.”

~ Dorothy Parker

“We had a lot in common. I loved him and he loved him.”

~ Shelley Winters

 

“After all my erstwhile dear, my no longer cherished; Need we say it was not love, just because it perished?”

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

So, whether you in the early stages of a broken heart or long since past it, here’s wishing you love and remembering that the best way to get the love that all of us secretly or not-so-secretly desire is to start by loving ourselves.

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Editor: Bryonie Wise