O death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest. Let pass my weary guilty ghost out of my careful breast.

One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .

One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying than the subject of death.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.

Could she endure it, the long vigil of death made visible?

I can't quite believe he has actually left this scene, left our lives, wherein he was always so significant!

But he was surrendered, they had surrendered him, into the power of death.

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)