Then I met you, young, ardent, happy, and I tried to make you the man I had longed for in my noisy solitude. What I loved in you was not the man who was, but the man who was going to be. You do not accept the position, you reject it as unworthy of you; you are an ordinary lover. Do like the others; pay me, and say no more about it.

The more I reflected the more I said to myself that Marguerite had no reason for feigning a love which she did not feel, and I said to myself also that women have two ways of loving, one of which may arise from the other: they love with the heart or with the senses. [...] often a girl who has sought in marriage only the union of two pure affections receives the sudden revelation of physical love, that energetic conclusion of the purest impressions of the soul.

If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.

Manon died in the desert, but in the arms of the man who loved her with the the entire brilliance of his soul, who, when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with his tears, then buried his own heart within it..While Marguerite, a Sinner like Manon, had died in a sumptuous bed...But in that desert of the heart, a more barren, a vaster, a more merciless desert, than that in which Manon had found her last resting place.

I dreamed incredible dreams of the future; I said to myself that she should owe to me her moral and physical recovery, that I should spend my whole life with her, and that her love should make me happier than all the maidenly loves in the world.

How many ways does the heart take, how many reasons does it invent for itself, in order to arrive at what it wants!

I shall never be myself again until I have seen Marguerite. It is perhaps the thirst of the fever, a sleepless night’s dream, a moment’s delirium; but though I were to become a Trappist, like M. de Rance’, after having seen her, I will see her.