Dying For Her Love Quotes & Sayings

On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse.
"There was this little boy I was taking care of," she said "and he was terminally ill,and we all knew it,but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn't die, it was so sad.
And his parents were always there with him,giving him so much love and support,but he was in so much pain,and it really was,time for him to go.
So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, 'You have to tell your son it's okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.' And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over, that it was okay for him to go,and,well,after a few moments,his son died. — Anthony Rapp

What was it like?" Manon asked quietly. "To love." For love was what it had been - what Asterin perhaps alone of all the Ironteeth witches had felt, had learned. "It was like dying a little every day. It was like being alive, too. It was joy so complete it was pain. It destroyed me and unmade me and forged me. I hated it, because I knew I couldn't escape it, and knew it would forever change me. And that witchling ... I loved her, too. I loved her in a way I cannot describe - other than to tell you that it was the most powerful thing I've ever felt, greater than rage, than lust, than magic. — Sarah J. Maas

Of love ... daroga ... I am dying ... of love ... That is how it is ... loved her so! ... And I love her still ... daroga ... and I am dying of love for her, I ... I tell you! ... If you knew how beautiful she was ... when she let me kiss her ... alive ... It was the first ... time, daroga, the first ... time I ever kissed a woman ... Yes, alive ... I kissed her alive ... and she looked as beautiful as if she had been dead!" The — Gaston Leroux

And maybe love is terrifying. I'm terrified now, but not in the way she would think.
I'm terrified because I hate who she is and what she's done, I do, and yet there is still something strong and powerful between us, some kind of deep, primal bond that won't end, won't snap or break or change, it just remains there inside me, as sold and factual as my blood and bones - she is my mother, I am her daughter - and I don't know what to call it because it doesn't feel like love, not the good kind I felt for Ellie, with all my heart, but instead an instinctual pull that's been there from the beginning, drawing me back to her again and again, the woman who has hurt me like no one else ever could, and now she's dying and the bond is still here, inside me, and I won't call it love or hate because emotions has nothing to do with the fact that she is my mother and I am her daughter, and we will be connected in that way forever. — Laura Wiess

And here she was. Lying on the floor of a dusty, empty, locked room thinking how grateful she felt.
She smiled, though it hurt tremendously to do so, thinking how blessed she had been to have spent twelve years with the most precious gifts from God. She felt honored that they called her mother. She knew she had done the best she could teaching them about life and love, faith and family.
Margo lay slowly dying from the wounds inflicted by a monster, but she was at peace. Because though the devil meant it for evil, God turned it to good. — Karen Luellen

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. — D.H. Lawrence

I visit my assistant mistress. "Well, Azalea," I say, sitting in the best chair, "what has happened to you since my last visit?" Azalea tells me what happened to her. She has covered a sofa, and written a novel. Jack has behaved badly. Roger has lost his job (replaced by an electric eye). Gigi's children are in the hospital being detoxified, all three. Azalea herself is dying of love. I stroke her buttocks, which are perfection, if you can have perfection, under the capitalistic system. "It is better to marry that to burn," St. Paul says, but St. Paul is largely discredited now, for the toughness of his views does not accord with the experience of advanced industrial societies. — Donald Barthelme

My mother's dying and may not live through the week. So, yes, I'd rather die trying to save her than live with the guilt of wondering if I could have. If you can't understand caring that much for someone you love then you're one coldhearted bastard. (Abbie) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Esi stared at her mother then, and it was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Maame was not a whole woman. There were large swaths of her spirit missing, and no matter how much she loved Esi, and no matter how much Esi loved her, they both knew in that moment that love could never return what Maame had lost. And Esi knew, too, that her mother would die rather than run into the woods ever again, die before capture, die even if it meant that in her dying, Esi would inherit that unspeakable sense of loss, learn what it meant to be un-whole. — Yaa Gyasi

Manon told herself it was for an alliance. Told herself it was for show.
But all she could see was the unconditional love in that dying wyvern's eyes as she unbuckled her harness, stood from the saddle, and leapt off Abraxos. — Sarah J. Maas

Miss Annie, is it wrong for me to believe it was Jesus who asked my forgiveness?" I asked her.
She frowned and shook her head, "Lord, what do they teach you at that school?" she said. Then she faced me head-on. "Did God humble himself by becoming a man?" she asked, every word spoken more loudly than the one before.
"Yes, ma'am," I said. I'd never used the word ma'am before, but it seemed an excellent time to start.
"Did he humble himself by dying on the cross to show us how much he loved us? she asked, waving her spatula at me.
My eyes widened and I nodded, yes.
Miss Annie's body relaxed, and she put her hand on her hip. "So why wouldn't Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?" she asked.
"But if Jesus is perfect
"
Miss Annie ambled the five or six feet that separated us and took my hand. "Son," she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, "love always stoops. — Ian Morgan Cron

Hannah Arendt scorned this preoccupation with death and proposed a new symbolism that emphasized not the inevitability of our dying, but the actuality of our living. She wanted us to think of ourselves, not as mortals, but as natals, as those who are alive; and she wanted us to act for love not hatred of the world ... In her exposition of Arendt, [Jantzen] points out that Christianity's preoccupation with death and salvation worked against a sense of connection to the web of life,'and taught people to be homeless in the world'. — Richard Holloway

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day. — D.H. Lawrence

The woman dying of cancer in The Barracks facing the raw fear of everything in her life disintegrating. The abused adolescent boy in The Dark whose life is torn open for us. They are such raw books of individuals facing the terrors of life. But then these individuals began to merge more into group portraits. That's not to say he's not still searching for a balance and equilibrium in the face of those horrors - the horrors are always there in McGahern. But the celebration of wonder and of love in the face of fear and terror, the beauty in simple things, become his central preoccupation. He starts to celebrate communal bonds in a way he didn't do at all in the beginning. — John McGahern

You still love her, don't you?" Pie said, once they were out and walking. "Of course I love her," Estabrook said. "That's why I want her dead." "There's no resurrection, Mr. Estabrook. Not for you, at least." "It's not me who's dying," he said. "I think it is," came the — Clive Barker

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race - we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: 'Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.' Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing. — Robert A. Heinlein

And me not sleeping tonight or tomorrow night or any night for a long while, now that this has started. And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? 'What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!' And why not? — Ray Bradbury

Thousands of desires, each worth dying for...
Many of them I have realized...yet I yearn for more...
Why should my killer (lover) be afraid? No one will hold her responsible,
For the blood which will continuously flow through my eyes all my life. — Avinash Advani

In the beloved community of 'Our Father,' the same desperate love that a mother has for her baby or that a child has for his or her daddy is extended to all our human family. Biological love is too small a vision. Nationalism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives or the people of our own country is not a bad things. But our love does not stop at the border. We now have a family that includes by transcends biology and geography. We have family in Iraq, Peru, Afghanistan and Sudan. We have family members who are starving and homeless, dying of AIDS and living in the midst of war. This is the new family of our Father. — Shane Claiborne

But she left him. That night the angels came back for her, like she'd asked them to. And nobody who saw the heartbreak on Grandpa's face when Granny breathed her last would have thought for one minute that he was glad to get shet of her ... — Olive Ann Burns

I want to undress you, touch you, kiss you, taste you. And then I want you to taste yourself on my mouth." He kissed her again, hot and strong and long. One hand crept to her clothed breast, kneading it. "I want you hard and hot and deep and fast. And then I want you slow and sweet. I want you to wrap those beautiful long legs around me. I want you under me and on top of me and sitting and standing. I want to see your eyes when pleasure makes you light up. I want to hold you when you come down and try to find your breath. I want everything with you, Ellie. I care about you more than I've cared about a woman in so long. I hardly recognized the feelings. I'm dying for you." (Noah Kincaid) — Robyn Carr

But with her eyes closed, she began to whisper. "If you have someone to love, then love. If you have someone to forgive, then forgive. You think, when you're seventeen, there's time enough for that, but there's not. There's no time at all."
I squeezed her hand, trying to think of how to respond. But she took the burden from me and kept whispering. "You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that's the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Make love to me. Please. I'm dying for it, for you. And therein lay the other major problem. His body was a wreck along with his mind. His past addictions were spinning in desperation and it was taking everything he had to keep from flying apart. The hunger to hurt and be hurt had never been more volatile and each second he didn't connect with Mercy, it grew worse. But how exactly was a monster cyclone supposed to connect with an angel and not rip her apart in ways that made him feel vile and dirty? Fuck, he never wanted to feel that with her. — Lucian Bane

We named her Dorothy Ann. Dolly, for short. I kissed her warily, fearful of the pain of loving her, love her, though love her I did; fearful lest she hurt me by dying. — Nancy E. Turner

It made her sad, thinking about the consequences of their anger, their thirst for revenge. Her husband was gone, ripped from her, and for what? People were dying, and for what? She thought how things could've gone so differently, how they'd had all these dreams, unrealistic perhaps, of a real change in power, an easy fix to impossible and intractable problems. Back then she'd been unfairly treaded, but at least she'd been safe. There had been injustice, but she'd been in love. Did that make it okay? Which sacrifice made more sense? — Hugh Howey

It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything for certain, had jammed itself in her throat for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. — Patricia Highsmith

He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better. — Chelsea Handler

They stared at each other. Every ocean, every river, every minute they had walked together was in their gaze. He said nothing and she said nothing. She kneeled by him, her hands on him, on his chest, on his heart, on his lungs that took air in but could not move air out, on his open wound; her eyes were on him, and in their eyes was every block of uncounted, unaccounted-for time, every moment they had lived since June 22, 1941, the day war started for the Soviet Union. Her eyes were filled with everything she felt for him. Her eyes were true. — Paullina Simons

Don't cry, Mary," Eden croaked. "I didn't mean to make you cry."
My lip quivered as I softly replied, "You're dying. How could I not cry?"
I didn't hear Lucas walk up behind me, but he put his hand on my shoulder for comfort. I sniffed back tears as I looked at my aunt lying helplessly in the hospital bed. I took in a sharp breath as Eden's glassy eyes searched mine.
"I love you," Eden said weakly, coughing into her shaking hand.
"I love you, too," I whispered. "But this isn't goodbye. Don't say goodbye," I pleaded. — Barbara C. Doyle

Worse, in the video for it (which is also played everywhere constantly), Boris is singing to a girl who is dying in a hospital bed, and Boris is telling her (lyrically) that he'll give her a million stars (plus his love) if she'll find the strength within herself to not die, and love him forever.
Of course the girl is so moved by this hot rocker dude's amazing song that she doesn't die. Because it is a medical fact that people with fatal diseases only need a hot rocker dude to sit on the edge of their hospital bed and sing them a rock ballad in order to give them the strength to go on living. — Meg Cabot

Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. Sh e seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? we used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries. — Martin Amis

The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too. — Nalo Hopkinson

Disconsolate, she lowered her head, and her eyes fell upon her bodice, upon the even more languishing eyes of the wilted blossoms, which seemed ready to weep under their withered eyelids. The thought of the brevity of her unconscious dream about him, of the brevity of their happiness if ever it materialized, was associated for her with the sadness of those flowers, which, before dying, languished on the heart that they had felt beating with her first love, her first humiliation, and her first sorrow. — Marcel Proust

I am going to die of love ... daroga ... I am dying of love ... That's how it is ... I loved her so! And I love her still ... daroga ... and I am dying of love for her, I tell you! if you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her ... It was the first ... time, daroga, the first time I ever kissed a woman.. Yes, alive ... I kissed her alive ... And she looked as beautiful as if she had been dead! — Gaston Leroux

When you're dying, the unicorn up in heaven gets a note from an angel telling her there's a person who's going to need a ride up soon. The unicorn finds out what the person likes. Favorite foods and books, colors and activities, pets and games. She gets a room ready for him, or her, near people who she knows they'll enjoy being with, maybe other friends and family who have died before.
When the unicorn is done, she jumps off of heaven's perch, flies through the blue sky, around the clouds, over any rainbows, and down to the person. She's invisible to everyone. She patiently waits. When the person dies, she gathers them up on her back, using her hooves and horn. All of a sudden, they sit up straight and smile, they laugh, because they're on top of a unicorn and alive again. They hold on tight to her golden reins and the unicorn takes them to their new home, where they're happy. — Cathy Lamb

Ah! If you have a self-will in your hearts, pray to God to uproot it. Have you self-love? Beseech the Holy Spirit to turn it out; for if you will always will to do as God wills, you must be happy. I have heard of some good old woman in a cottage, who had nothing but a piece of bread and a little water, and lifting up her hands, she said, as a blessing, "What!? all this, and Christ too?" What is "all this," compared with what we deserve? And I have read of someone dying, who was asked if he wished to live or die; and he said, "I have no wish at all about it." "But if you might wish, which would you choose?" "I would not choose at all." "But if God bade you choose?" "I would beg God to choose for me, for I would not know which to take." Oh happy state! to be perfectly acquiescent, to lie passive in His hand, and know no will but His. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Women-in-jeopardy movies are, in essence, the updated versions of men dying to save the princess from the dragon to earn her love. They are modern-day training films for teaching women to select the best protectors while weeding out the rest. — Warren Farrell

"GG BE." I expressed how a guy's love for his woman is dying out because he is tired of how she lies to him all the time. And the woman in the song is waiting for me to break up with her. You know how some people prefer to get dumped than do the dumping, right? I expressed all this, which could happen to anyone, in a Seungri-like way. — Seungri

Oh God, what do we do?"
"Do?" Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized, Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn't have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn't a mere auditory hallucination. "We save her, of course. — Matthew J. Hefti

Katie appeared as a ghost and cradled him in her arms and carried him, a frail dying version of her old husband, to heaven. The radio which was powered off suddenly comes on and played their song Follow Me. Nobody could see her only Ronan and he smiled and says "I knew you would come back for me love — Annette J. Dunlea

To Jesus she already is somebody. Like the loving father of the prodigal son, Jesus is frantically scanning the horizon, watching for Madonna to return to him. He's absolutely convinced that she's so valuable that she's worth dying for. 'Greater love has no one than this,' said Jesus in John 15:13, 'that one lay down his life for his friends.' That's what He did for her on the cross! — Lee Strobel

Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.
In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.
But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shing head they will flutter
And fall-and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.
And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them-
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains. — Anna Akhmatova

You were right the first time, Cathy. It was a stupid, silly story.
Ridiculous! Only insane people would die for the sake of love. I'll
bet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic trash!"
Just a minute ago I'd despised that author for bringing about such a
miserable ending, then there I went, rushing to the defense. "T. M.
Ellis could very well have been a man! Though I doubt any woman writer
in the nineteenth century had much chance of being published, unless
she used her initials, or a man's name. And why is it all men think
everything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain silly
drivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of finding
the perfect love? And it seems to me, that Raymond was far more
mushy-minded than Lily! — V.C. Andrews

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: Only God knows how much I loved you — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds. — Julian Barnes

I mean it,' he said. 'I love your nose.'
Love. He'd said it. Though only for her nose ...
Her eyes grew larger, wider behind her eyeglasses. She looked afraid, yet full of hope. She was dying to believe him about something she couldn't see in herself.
'I don't like my nose,' she said.
'You're so hard on yourself. I think your nose is the best nose I've ever met.'
She gave a little snort. 'You see? The best nose. Honestly. You aren't supposed to notice a woman's nose.'
'Why not?'
'It's supposed to blend in, be part of the overall beauty of her well-proportioned face.'
'Yours is part of your overall beauty.'
She made a face at him, complete with tongue stuck out. — Judith Ivory

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Why don't all Christians and Muslims say something like the abbot when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is told by the doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn't she beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday in the Seychelles? 'I can't wait!' Why don't faithful visitors at her bedside shower her with messages for those that have gone before? 'Do give my love to Uncle Robert when you see him . . . ' Why — Richard Dawkins

The doctor nodded. "Nemesis is bonded to you now. She'll live and breathe for you all the days of your life."
"I like her, too," Donia declared, smiling at me. "I think we'll become friends."
The doctor laughed softly. "Friends, yes. I promise you, Nemesis will be the best friend you'll ever have. She'll love you until your dying day."
And at last, I had a name for this feeling, this strange but wonderful new sensation within me - this was what the Impyrean Matriarch had promised me.
This was love. — S.J. Kincaid

Is it really worth dying for the person you love?"
[Maureen] thinks about this for a moment. "That's not the real question, Oliver. What you should be asking is, Can you live without her? — Jodi Picoult

It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you're in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It's the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can't quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That's where the problem begins, right there - I'm sure of it. — Yukio Mishima

Concha would cry when she found out I was dead, she should have no taste for life for months afterward. But I was still the one who was going to die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. when she looked at me something passed her to me. But I knew it was over: if she looked at me now the look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn't reach me. I was alone — Jean-Paul Sartre

-"Do you know what it's like to be condemned to love?"
-"But isn't it always like that?" Svetlana asked, trembling with indignation. "When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny!"
Once again I sensed that infinitely naive girl in her, the girl who couldn't hate anything except herself. The girl who was already beginning to disappear.
-"No, Sveta, haven't you ever heard love compared to a flower?"
-"Yes."
-"A flower can be grown, Sveta. But it can be bought too, or given as a gift."
-"Did Anton buy it?"
-"No," I said, a bit too sharply. "It was a gift. From destiny."
-"What difference does that make? If it is love?"
-"Sveta, cut flowers are beautiful, but they don't live for long. They're already dying, even the ones that are carefully placed in a crystal vase and given fresh water. — Sergei Lukyanenko

Shall we go to Paris next spring? You will certainly be well by then. I agree that Dr. Tapper is far more intelligent and sensible than many of his profession. If he tells you that you are not to be slogging through the Wissahickon in this weather, you must deisit with your daily slog. Your lungs are fragile, my love. I would not have you expiring for a sight of interesting lichen. Love is one of two things worth dying for.I have yet to decide on the second.It is most certainly not colorful fungus.
I shall be home as soon as this business is settled, certainly no more than a week.My mother complains that you will not have her to dinner. Good for you. Take pity on Hamilton's new wife and have her to tea.Fire the cook, please.I cannot face another dish of sweetbreads.
With all my love always,
Edward — Melissa Jensen

Elizabeth nodded, looking too dejected to do much more. "Can she just go back to him?" she pleaded. "He's dying. She's dying. They can't have a life together, but at least they could have this."
No, Kahlen is Mine. We'll fix her.
"With what?" Elizabeth demanded through tears. "There's nothing left."
"Please," I said, letting all the dams burst, exposing every last drop of love I had for Akinli. "You've seen how I feel now. I've shared everything . . . — Kiera Cass

All things end. They rarely end as we would like them to and often do so before we are ready. We transition in a way that gives our loss honor; we grieve with a love and true appreciation for what we have no longer. It was clear that my mom was ready to go; it was her time. My love of her and my desperation to keep her in my life were of no consequence to that fact, any more than my relentless attempts to improve The Lyon's Den kept it from cancellation. Both personally and professionally I was swamped with the message: Your plan pales compared to the larger one. — Rob Lowe

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. — Cheryl Strayed

And then last autumn his heart had stopped working properly. The veterinarian said that they just had to care for him and love him, and Batty had loved him, and loved him, and loved him, but it hadn't been enough. No one in her family had ever said that Hound's dying was her fault, but she knew the truth. She hadn't been able to keep him with her, to stop him from leaving her behind. — Jeanne Birdsall

And the next day the gondolier came with a train of other gondoliers, all decked in their holiday garb, and on his gondola sat Angela, happy, and blushing at her happiness. Then he and she entered the house in which I dwelt, and came into my room (and it was strange indeed, after so many years of inversion, to see her with her head above her feet!), and then she wished me happiness and a speedy restoration to good health (which could never be); and I in broken words and with tears in my eyes, gave her the little silver crucifix that had stood by my bed or my table for so many years. And Angela took it reverently, and crossed herself, and kissed it, and so departed with her delighted husband.
And as I heard the song of the gondoliers as they went their way
the song dying away in the distance as the shadows of the sundown closed around me
I felt that they were singing the requiem of the only love that had ever entered my heart. — W.S. Gilbert

You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that. — Wendy Wunder