I was looking through old posts and found these quotes I had posted after reading John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and thought they were particularly applicable again now:

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
--Graham Greene, in The Power and the Glory

"What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?" --George Eliot, in Adam Bede

"But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination." --Irving

"He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" --Eliot, in Middlemarch

"There is no intolerance in America that compares to the peculiarly American intolerance for lack of success." --Irving