When Someone You Love Dies

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's
gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

-John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Love Is a Sour Delight

Love is a sour delight; a sug'red grief
A living death; an ever-dying life
A breach of Reason's law; a secret thief
A sea of tears; an ever-lasting strife
A bait for fools; a scourge of noble wits
A Deadly wound; a shot which ever hits.
Love is a blinded God; an angry boy
A Labyrinth of doubts; an idle lust
A slave to Beauty's will; a witless toy
A ravening bird, a tyrant most unjust
A burning heat; a cold; a flattering foe
A private hell; a very world of woe.
Yet mighty Love regard not what I say,
Which lie in trance bereft of all my wits,
But blame the light that leads me thus astray,
And makes my tongue blaspheme by frantic fits:
Yet hurt her not, left I sustain the smart,
Which am content to lodge her in my heart.

-Thomas Watson: Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love, Sonnet XVIII (1582)

Love Quote - I Loved You Once

I loved thee once. I’ll love no more,
Thine be the grief, as is the blame;
Thou art not what thou wast before,
What reason I should be the same?

-Sir Robert Aytoun (1570-1638)