"You must allow me to tell you how ardently…."
In other words, I’m posting on Access Romance today about favorite fictional declarations of love. I’ll also be giving away a signed copy of either Night Jasmine or Crimson Rose (the winner gets to pick).
“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” -Mr. Darcy.
although coming in a close second is
“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means
as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half
hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone
for ever…” -Captain Wentworth.
so studly and romantic….
Well, Mr. Darcy takes it for me, but I also love this declaration, from A.S. Byatt’s “Posession,” where Roland, the much-put-upon hero, declares his love for the very reticent Maud:
“I love you…It isn’t convenient. Not now I’ve acquired a future. But that’s how it is. In the worst way. All the things we–we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look alive and everything else–fades. All that.”
Beautifully honest, and so poignant!
Who says it has to be the gentlemen who make declarations of love? Cathy’s declaration from WH, although from it sprang tragic consequences, is always poignant to me: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am. What ever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” to “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihlated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger…I AM Heathcliff!”
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: Where ‘I’ does not exist, nor ‘You’, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”
By Pablo Nerudo
This is an excerpt from a sonnet but I think it is beautiful because it is truly love because pride does not exist in love and love makes two souls one.
I know Mr. Darcy is already on the list, but this is my FAV of his:
“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” — Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice
This one’s kinda long. . .:
“Most true is it that ‘beauty is in the eye of the gazer.’ My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.” — Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre
~lAUra
hmmm. . .idk why it did that weird ae thingie. lol!
~lAUra