“Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;In my own way, and with my full consent.Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarelyWent to their deaths more proud than this one went.Some nights of apprehension and hot weepingI will confess; but that's permitted me;Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keepingRubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.If I had loved you less or played you slylyI might have held you for a summer more,But at the cost of words I value highly,And no such summer as the one before.Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,I shall have only good to say of you.”

“I thought perhaps that when you told me you did not love me that my own feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that”

“I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to any one less worthy.”

“The more you experience love, the more full of it you should be. But the opposite sometimes happens, because you fear the loss of life. You fear the vulnerability that can take the goodness of it away. This might have happened because when i was just a kid, i had the sense that your whole life can change with a death in the family. It's like they say - at least i say - It's the loss of money that leads to the love of it. You know, the people who care about money are never the people who made a lot. They're the people who have lost a lot. And I think that might be true in relationships, when if you've lost somebody important to you early on, you live in fear of that the rest of your life. I suppose that's one of the things that I would fear, and that might explain the rage you referred to earlier, which is real in me, at some point, it really is. An odd thing to own up to, but I do know it's true.”

“At the end of the day, can you look back and say to yourself, "Today, my mother would be proud of me because I gave it all I had"? If you can, you will have had a very good day. And if you can do this every day, you will have a very good life.”

“Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke,I love, as you would have me, God the most;Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost,Nor with Lot's wife cast back a faithless lookUnready to forego what I forsook;This say I, having counted up the cost,This, tho' I be the feeblest of God's host,The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with His crook.Yet while I love my God the most, I deemThat I can never love you overmuch;I love Him more, so let me love you too;Yea, as I apprehend it, love is suchI cannot love you if I love not Him.I cannot love Him if I love not you.”