62 Years Later, the Best 'Peanuts' Quote About Love Is Still a Quintessential Comic Strip Line

Sep 15, 2026 - 07:16

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62 Years Later, the Best 'Peanuts' Quote About Love Is Still a Quintessential Comic Strip Line

Published Sep 15, 2026, 12:00 AM EDT

Good grief

One of the most enduring themes of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics is young love — or, more specifically, unrequited young love. Throughout his 50 years of drawing the comic strip, Schulz almost never featured a great love story where both parties felt the same way about each other. Instead, one kid would pine for the affections of another, while the other kid wanted nothing to do with them. Yeah, it’s sad, but it’s also part of the real-world quality of Schulz’s work. Sure, some of his strips may have featured a beagle flying an airplane, but there’s something about the slice-of-life adventures of Charlie Brown and the gang that has kept the comic perpetually relatable.

Originally, I planned to look for the best Peanuts quote about falling in love — something toching and profound that you might find on a Valentine's Day card. But the more I started digging, the more I realized that, no matter how sweet the comic strip could be, heartbreak was a more enduring theme than true love. My search did, however, eventually lead me to the best Peanuts quote about love, though it was far from what I was expecting.

Naturally, since Charlie Brown is the star of Peanuts, I looked to him first for the perfect Peanuts quote about love, but all I found was heartbreak, mostly with him being too afraid to speak with the otherwise unnamed Little Red-Haired Girl. He did have a girlfriend for a few years in the 1990s; it was a girl he met at summer camp named Peggy Jean, but she eventually moved away without telling Charlie Brown how to reach her. When they finally reconnect, she has a boyfriend.

Charlie Brown has also been on the other end of this equation. Peppermint Patty, as well as her best friend Marcie, both harbor crushes on good ol’ Charlie Brown. But Charlie Brown doesn’t feel the same way about either of them, leaving them as high and dry as the Little Red-Haired Girl and Peggy Jean left him.

Peanuts Charlie Brown love Peppermint Patty

Maybe Lucy, I thought next. While Lucy is probably the least tender character in the Peanuts gang, she does love to dispense advice, and while it's usually terrible, I thought maybe she would have accidentally said something insightful about true love. But no, Lucy’s no better at love than Charlie Brown is, and arguably even worse than him. She regularly crushes on Schroeder, pouring out her affections for him while putting her head on his piano. Schroeder, however, is not just uninterested, but admits that he’s “barely able to tolerate” Lucy.

Even Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, regularly deals with rejection. While she longs for her “Sweet Baboo” (aka, her brother’s friend Linus), he only seems annoyed by her affections. He especially doesn’t like when she calls him her Sweet Baboo.

After that much digging, that’s when I realized that Peanuts had far more insight into heartbreak than it did about the lighter side of love. Sometimes, Schulz’s work is seen as overly sweet, bordering on downright saccharine, and while his characters had adorned all kinds of corny Hallmark cards and the like, the content of his comic strip was much subtler, to the point where it can be a bit cynical at times. That’s why the best Peanuts quote about love isn’t uplifting. It’s downright depressing, illustrating just how much unrequited love depresses your whole existence.

It comes from a 1964 comic strip where Charlie Brown is all alone, about to eat his lunch. He’s talking to himself about how much he loves the Little Red-Haired Girl and how she seems to be entirely unaware of his existence. Then he takes a bite of his sandwich and reacts with a disgusted “Bleah!” In the final panel, he perfectly sums up love in the Peanuts comic strip by saying the following:

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like unrequited love!”