“No-one speaks. No-one moves (…). We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells”

“She sang that night like - I cannot say like an angel, for her songs were all of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade; perhaps, then, like a fallen angel - or yet again like a falling one: she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed. And as she did so, I sang with her - not loudly and carelessly like the rest of the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear me the better if I whispered rather than bawled.”

“We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.”

“We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.”

“And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.”

“Being in love, you know... it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.”

“You're not sure? Look at your own fingers. Are you not sure, if they are yours? Look at any part of you - it might be me that you are looking at! We are the same, you and I. We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shinning matter. Oh, I could say, I love you - that is a simple thing to say, the sort of thing your sister might say to her husband. I could say that in a prison letter, four times a year. but my spirit does not love yours - it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that or wither! You are like me.”