I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Randolph Henry Ash: “What is it? My dear?”
Christabel LaMotte: “Ah, how can we bear it?”
Randolph Henry Ash: “Bear what?”
Christabel LaMotte: “This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?”
Randolph Henry Ash: “We can be quiet together, and pretend – since it is only the beginning – that we have all the time in the world.”
Christabel LaMotte: “And every day we shall have less. And then none.”
Randolph Henry Ash: “Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?”
Christabel LaMotte: “No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for.

Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed.

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.