“I will love you like no other for I have died a thousand tiny deaths and everytime I died I thought of you.”
“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. Icertainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have laindown together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked fleshthe colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Haveyou seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye againstyour collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a treeand climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? Youkept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed forme, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slowword, you can’t rush it...”
“I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.”
“Animals die, friends die, and I shall die, but one thing never dies, and that is the reputation we leave behind at our death.”
“I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.”
“And we die together." He smiled softly. "I would prefer that. I do not want to live in this worldーor any other world, for that matterーwithout you.”
“And there was somewhere inside me the thought: By Jove! this is the deuce of an adventure - something you read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate - and I am only twenty - and here I am lasting it out as well as any of these men, and keeping my chaps up to the mark. I was pleased. I would not have given up the experience for worlds. I had moments of exultation. Whenever the old dismantled craft pitched heavily with her counter high in the air, she seemed to me to throw up, like an appeal, like a defiance, like a cry to the clouds without mercy, the words written on her stern: Judea, London. Do or Die. O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting around the world a lot of coal for a freight - to me she was the endeavor, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. ”