“For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did.”

“If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.”

“It scared me to need anyone so much. if our souls became inextricably tangled, would mine still be mine? Did I care?”

“I did not know then that there are those you love no matter how much they hurt you, no matter how many years have passed since you felt them in the morning. I did not know how long it took to get over such a love, and that even when you did, when you loved again, you would always carry a sliver of it in your stitched-together heart. I did not know that you could love them in death, and that if one day they returned to you in a dream or half sleep, you might hold up your hand as she had done, because life and time had changed you.”

“What an unsubstantial, happy, foolish time! Of all the times of mine that Time has in his grip, there is none that in one retrospection I can smile at half so much, and think of half so tenderly.”

“One half of me is yours, the other half is yours,Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,And so all yours.”