Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

"It's very simple. You've just got to give up a little of you for him. Don't make everything a game. Just late night in that little room upstairs. But take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage...Like two out of every ten couples...But you'll be one of the two, baby..."

Some people care too much. I think it's called love.

a barrier of indescribably experience between men and the women whom they loved, thrusting horror deeper and deeper inward, linking the dread of spiritual death to the apprehension of physical disaster.

does physical revulsion induce a reciprocal need for physical union, even erotic contact, as if only the coming together of healthy bodies in a context of wholeness and pleasure could sooth the daily assault on the most intimate of human senses?

But there lay a deeper emotional and ethical crisis: the limits of empathy when the nurse was faced with the absoluteness of physical pain.

I've never been so close before to human beings. We are locked together, the old ones and I, and the wounded men; we are bound together. We all feel it. We all know it. The same thing is throbbing in us, the single thing, the one life. We are one body, suffering and bleeding.

How many women, I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these men who were lying on the floor?

The pain of one creature cannot continue to have a meaning for another. It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not imagine. A deadlock!

Even my hand must not meet his-no, not even in a careless touch, not even in its "duty"; or, if it does, what risk!