“We outgrow love like other things and put it in the drawer.”
Emily Dickinson, 1890 · American poet, 1830 to 1886
Chapter 8
On Love That Ends
“Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light.”
Emily Dickinson, 1890 · American poet, 1830 to 1886
“All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”
Jane Austen, 1817 · English novelist, 1775 to 1817, speaking through Anne Elliot
“A friend is not known till he is lost.”
Italian proverb, 1857 · recorded in a nineteenth-century collection of European proverbs
“Husband and wife are indeed birds of one grove, but at the bourn of death each takes his separate flight.”
Chinese proverb, 1875 · recorded in a nineteenth-century collection of Chinese proverbs
“When you part from your friend, you grieve not; for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
Kahlil Gibran, 1923 · Lebanese American poet and painter, 1883 to 1931
“Every fair shape you have seen, every deep saying you have heard, be not cast down that it perished; for that is not so.”
Rumi, 1907 · Persian poet and Sufi teacher, 1207 to 1273
Waldinger's blunt summary of eighty years of data was that loneliness kills, and that its effect is as powerful as smoking or alcoholism. The people who fare worst are the ones left with no one.
Harvard Study of Adult Development, 2017 · research finding on loneliness and mortality
Americans who had lost a partner late in life told researchers the same thing repeatedly: do not give up on finding love again. Many reported new love arriving in their seventies and eighties.
Cornell Legacy Project, 2025 · research finding on late-life love after loss
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
Leo Tolstoy, 1869 · Russian novelist, 1828 to 1910, speaking through Prince Andrei
Free to read, always. Liking a verse or leaving a comment happens in the app, so the conversation has a name attached to it.