My readers – especially those of you who follow me on Twitter – know me as a writer who takes great inspiration from quotations. When it comes to aphorisms and proverbs, I am something of a collector, noting them down for inspiration in my writing, or to share on Twitter. Recently, while researching I stumbled across a news article on a survey conducted to discover the most romantic lines in literature (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/02/10/arts-us-books-romance-idUKTRE7198H220110210). Here are the results, in order:

1. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” – Emily Brontë
2. “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.” – A.A. Milne
3. “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.” – Shakespeare
4. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” – W.H. Auden
5. “You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” – Dr. Seuss
6. “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 become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.” – Louis de Bernières
7. “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” – Robert Browning
8. “For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.” – Rosemonde Gerard
9. “But to see her was to love her, love but her, and love her forever.” – Robert Burns
10. “I hope before long to press you in my arms and shall shower on you a million burning kisses as under the Equator.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, to wife Josephine

Such a mixture – from poetry, from fiction, from the world of theatre; written privately between a man and wife; written for children, or for adults.

What do you think? Would you pick these for your top ten? For me, there would have to be an Elizabeth Barrett Browning quote; perhaps, ‘How do I love thee?/Let me count the ways./I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach.’ And I’ve always loved Mark Twain’s ‘Wheresoever she was, there was Eden’, and Beethoven’s ‘Ever thine ever mine ever ours’.

And can a consideration of the most romantic words in literature be complete without Lord Byron? I will share with you now my favourite Byron poem, which makes me want to time-travel back to nineteenth century to a world where such wonderful romance was captured in verse.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!