“For what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since - on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
“I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
“My imagination can shape no other figure but hers; I see everything around me only in its relationship to her.” / “What does not remind me of you? Are you not all around me”
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
“I see your name everywhere in a book, a crossword puzzle… a newspaper. You’re always before my eyes”
— Cinema Paradiso (1988) dir. Giuseppe Tornatore
“I look for him everywhere.”
— Anaïs Nin, Fire: From “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1937.
