Britons have chosen a line from Emily Bronte's novel "Wuthering Heights" as the most romantic in English literature -- just in time for Valentine's Day.

A poll of 2,000 adults commissioned by Warner Home Video to mark the DVD release of the romantic comedy "Going the Distance" showed 20 percent of respondents chose the line: "whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

Fictional character Catherine Earnshaw's comment on her love for Heathcliff was followed by Winnie-The-Pooh, the fictional bear created by English writer AA Milne: "If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus one day, so I never have to live without you."

England's most famous playwright, William Shakespeare, came third with a line from his play about star-crossed lovers "Romeo and Juliet": "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun."

A list of quotes and their ranking by respondents follows:

1. "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" - Emily Bronte

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 "Romeo and Juliet"

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" - "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"

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's 1796 dispatch to wife Josephine.

點擊查看更多雙語新聞

(Agencies)