to ask for your favourite Romantic bits in books

[shakeituntilyoumakeit]

I’ve just read normal people and I just love the writing style where she doesn’t say much but you feel like you're in the same room, what other romance books are like this? Understated but very sexy at the same time? I normally read thrillers and didn’t realise you could write something so evocative without using jilly cooper style language. So what are your best book recommendations and if you can, what are the best bits of those books?

Several parts in Jane Eyre - in the garden, when they part, when they re-unite. Just lovely.

"Reader, I married him"

Anne laughed.

"I don't want sunbursts or marble halls, I just want you.
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island (Anne of Green Gables,

Sorry not a novel but I love the lyrics in the sheryl crow song All I Wanna Do “And a happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close to one another” I love the way she conveys the feeling in a few simple words how they really just want to rip each other’s clothes off and devour each other! Oh the passion 😀

Love this thread, my initial ideas already taken. I’m going to think hard.

Wentworths letter to Anne elliot in persusation. It's Jane austens best book.

Thinking of my teen days has to be in the 2nd hunger games book when Katniss has a bad dream on the train and goes to Peeta.

Or the final twilight book on the last page where they settle into their piece of forever

Or looking for Alaska where he says if people were rain, id be a drizzle and she'd be a hurricane.

From Great Expectations:
"I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be."

funnily enough I was thinking about this this morning-

“And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.
-Gabriel Oak”

― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

Wuthering heights , Cathy and Heathcliffs relationship ,so passionate but so destructive , so many parts regarding their love that are beautifully written . Would'nt say no to being ravished by Heathcliff on the moors !

Have you read Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends? That is also quite sexy but unsaid.

I was just coming on to mention Wentworth's letter in Persuasion but I see someone has beaten me to it! I agree it is definitely Jane Austen's best book.

"if he had not wanted me to love him, he should not have looked at me'

I think it's Graeme Greene but I'm not sure which book.

"She's come to collect my soul, I thought. But I never said she could have it" John Le Carre.

I was there, standing across your path, and because I was there, you met me, without any reasonable cause, without having wanted to do so: from that moment,you could choose to come closer to me or to run away from me, but you could not prevent my existing in your consciousness" Simone de Beauvoir.
( Oft quoted during drunken teenage being binned moments "waaaah, but I still exist in his consciousness I do I do" )

I’m writing a list here. I haven’t read jane eyre for years.

Ooh okaycokay I was going to say that exact bit, thanks for reminding me of the lovely quote! I'm going to read it right now

Wentworths letter to Anne elliot in persusation. It's Jane austens best book.

Definitely this!

The Wentworth letter doesn’t do anything for me out of context.

This .....

Godlike the man who sits at her side, who watches and catches that laughter which (softly) tears me to tatters: nothing is left of me, each time I see her... - Catullus

Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey in the punt.

One Day. It is just full of longing... sigh.

Memoirs of a Geisha; when Sayuri and the Chairman kiss. It’s so tender and gentle. I just love the whole novel but the unspoken love between these two characters had me hooked.

“And so you can imagine that this kiss, the first real one of my life, seemed to me more intimate than anything I'd ever experienced. I had the feeling I was taking something from the Chairman, and that he was giving something to me, something more private than anyone had ever given me before”

His Dark Materials, when Lyra and Will have to separate into their own worlds and know they won’t ever be able to be in the same world again 😭
“I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...“

Love these

I’d forgotten about sayuri and the chairman

“When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No … don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away.”

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières