Love quotes: who, when and why it matters

If you had to design a category of quotation guaranteed to be misattributed, you would design love quotes. Take lines that produce a strong emotional response, so that nobody feels like interrogating them. Attach them to famous poets, because a famous poet's name makes the sentiment feel authorized.

Circulate them through greeting cards, wedding blogs, captions, and engraved objects: media with no room for a citation and no tradition of carrying one. Then use them at weddings, funerals, and on skin, where the cost of being wrong is permanent and the checking rate is close to zero.

That is not a hypothetical. It is the actual supply chain, and it explains why romantic quotation is the worst-documented material in general circulation.

The lines, and whose they really are

Some of the most-quoted love lines in English are correctly attributed, and their dates hold up. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" is Sonnet 43 of Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850. Pablo Neruda's "Tonight I can write the saddest lines" is from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), but the English wording most people know is W. S. Merwin's translation, published in 1969. Sappho's fragment 31 reaches English through its translators, among them Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (2002).

The failures are just as concrete. "Love means never having to say you're sorry" is Erich Segal's line for Love Story (1970), given to a character rather than offered as the author's own view. The Rumi of English quotation is largely Coleman Barks: the renderings collected in The Essential Rumi (1995) are made from earlier English translations rather than from the Persian, and that is the name unattached romantic lines drift toward. And a shelf of lines pasted onto Dr. Seuss — "You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams" among them — appears in none of his books; those lines spread through internet quote collections from the 1990s onward, which is where that misattribution entered circulation.

What to take away

Four things that make this category unusually bad

Feeling suppresses checking. With a business claim or a historical assertion, a reader's instinct is to ask whether it is true. With a line about love, the instinct is to agree with it. You are not evaluating a proposition; you are endorsing a mood, and moods do not prompt footnote questions.

The name is doing status work. A quotation makes two claims at once — that someone wrote these words, and that this particular person did. "As the poet wrote" is not really a citation. It is a signal that the feeling has literary backing. Because the name is functioning as an ornament, nobody in the chain treats it as a factual claim, and so nobody checks it: while the reader receives it as one.

The carriers have no citation slot. A card, a caption, a printed order of service, a ring engraving, a tattoo. None of these formats has ever had room for an edition and a page, and the conventions that grew up around them assume there is nothing to record.

The uses are ceremonial and permanent. A misquoted line in an essay can be corrected. A misattributed line read aloud at a wedding is in the photographs, and one inked on a forearm is a lifetime commitment to somebody else's error.

The translation trap

A very large share of the most-loved romantic lines in English were not written in English. Classical Persian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and ancient Greek poetry all supply heavily quoted material, and every line of it reaches you through a translator.

This matters more than it sounds.

The honest form is short: name the translator alongside the poet, or say "in [translator]'s version". If you cannot find out who translated it, that is itself a strong sign you are holding a caption rather than a poem.

Fiction, film, and the character problem

Romantic lines lifted from novels, plays, and films carry an extra layer that captions strip off. A line is spoken by a character, to another character, at a point in a story, often ironically, often by someone the story goes on to show is wrong.

Three checks that take a minute each:

Rights, not just credit

There is a second question underneath attribution that this category runs into more than any other: much of the material is still in copyright.

Poems and song lyrics from the twentieth century onward generally are. Printing one on a wedding program, keepsake, merchandise, or in a book is reproduction, and reproduction is governed by permissions, not citation practice.

The rules differ by country and by use; this page is not the place to work them out. In the United States the term is set by the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C., and it turns on facts about the individual work: life of the author plus 70 years for a work created today, with the publication date deciding the term for older works. The U.S. Copyright Office sets out those definitions.

Know where the question gets answered: the publisher's permissions or rights department for a poem, and the music publisher, not the recording label, for lyrics. Both exist to answer this and handle small requests routinely.

If the underlying work is out of copyright, a modern translation of it may still be in copyright as a separate work. That is another reason to know whose English you are using.

Before it becomes permanent

A short pre-flight for anything that will be engraved, printed in quantity, read aloud at a ceremony, or tattooed:

Honest ways to use a line you cannot source

You are not obliged to abandon a sentence you love. You are only obliged not to lie about where it came from.

Common questions

It appears on hundreds of pages under the same name. Isn't that evidence?

It is evidence of copying. Hundreds of pages carrying identical wording and identical attribution is a signature of a single upstream source being duplicated, which tells you about circulation and nothing about origin. The pattern to look for instead is the earliest appearance: the first edition or periodical that prints the line.

Does it really matter at a wedding?

The stakes are social rather than scholarly, and reasonable people differ. What is worth noticing is that the fix is nearly free: two minutes with the actual book, or six words of honest hedging. Almost nobody objects to that trade once they see it.

The poet is long dead. Is there any harm?

Less legal risk, but the same two problems remain. Someone else made that sentence without credit, and a reader who checks will discount everything else you said.

When a living person is credited, the calculation changes entirely. Putting words in a living person's mouth in public is a different order of mistake, as our material on quotations attributed to living public figures sets out.