"Tell me then, have I no chance of ever succeeding?"

He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her.

"My dearest Emma," said he, "for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hours conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma --- tell me at once. Say 'No' if it is to be said." --- She could really say nothing. "You are silent," he cried with great animation, "absolutely silent! at present I ask no more."

Emma was almost ready to sink under the agitation of the moment. The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream was perhaps the most prominent feeling.

Jame Austen, Emma

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"I am so blest, Trotwood --- my heart is so overcharged --- but there is one thing I must say."

"Dearest, what?"

She laid her gentle hands upon my shoulders and looked calmly in my face.

"Do you know, yet, what it is?"

"I am afraid to speculate on what it is. Tell me, my dear."

"I have loved you all my life!"

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

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"How much do you think my own great fortune is?"

As Arthur looked at her inquiringly, with a new apprehension on him, she withdrew her hand, and laid her face down on the spot where it had rested.

"I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here. When papa came over to England, he confided everything he had to the same hands, and it is all swept away. O my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?"

Locked in his arms, held to his heart, with his manly tears upon her own cheek, she drew the slight hand round his neck and clasped it in its fellow-hand.

"Never to part, dearest Arthur; never any more until the last! I never was rich before, I never was proud before, I never was happy before, I am rich in being taken by you, I am proud in having been resigned by you, I am happy in being with you in this prison, as I should be happy in coming back to it with you, if it should be the will of God and comforting and serving you with all my love and truth. I am yours anywhere everywhere! I love you dearly! I would rather pass my life here with you, and go out daily, working for our bread, than I would have the greatest fortune that ever was told, and be the greatest lady that ever was honoured. O, if poor papa may only know how blest at last my heart is, in this room where he suffered for so many years!"

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

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I opened [the door] softly and found Miss Jellyby shivering there with a broken candle in a broken candlestick in one hand and an egg-cup in the other.

"Good night!" she said very sulkily.

"Good night!" said I.

"May I come in?" she shortly and unexpectedly asked me in the same sulky way.

"Certainly," said I. "Don't wake Miss Clare."

She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky middle finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and looking very gloomy.

"I wish Africa was dead!" she said on a sudden.

I was going to remonstrate.

"I do!" she said "Don't talk to me, Miss Summerson. I hate it and detest it. It's a beast!"

...

She was still standing by the bed, and now stooped down (but still with the same discontented face) and kissed Ada. That done, she came softly back and stood by the side of my chair. Her bosom was heaving in a distressful manner that I greatly pitied, but I thought it better not to speak.

"I wish I was dead!" she broke out. "I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal better for us."

In a moment afterwards, she knelt on the ground at my side, hid her face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted her and would have raised her, but she cried no, no; she wanted to stay there!

"You used to teach girls," she said, "If you could only have taught me, I could have learnt from you! I am so very miserable, and I like you so much!"

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

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"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in an eager half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea's arms round her -- urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something that oppressed her as if it were blood-guiltiness.

They moved apart, looking at each other.

"When you came yesterday -- it was not as you thought," said Rosamond in the same tone.

There was a moment of surprised attention in Dorothea. She expected a vindication of Rosamond herself.

"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he could never love me," said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as she went on. "And now I think he hates me because -- because you mistook him yesterday. He says it is through me that you will think ill of him -- think that he is a false person. But it shall not be through me. He has never had any love for me -- I know he has not -- he has always thought slightly of me. He said yesterday that no other woman existed for him besides you. The blame of what happened is entirely mine. He said he could never explain to you -- because of me. He said he could never think well of him again. But now I have told you, and he cannot reproach me any more."

Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known before. She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that she was repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like knife-wounds within her.

The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy. It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning made a resistant pain: -- she could only perceive that this would be joy when she had recovered her power of feeling it.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

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``Ah! Stay your hand --- I love you!''

W.S. Gilbert, H.M.S. Pinafore

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He rolled up the complete bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He readjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work toward him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:

I love you.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure that the words were really there.

George Orwell, 1984

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ותאמר רות אל תפגעי בי לעזבך לשיב מאחריך. כי אל אשר תלכי אלך ובאשר תליני אלין עמך עמי ואלקיך אלקי. באשר תמותי אמות ושם אקבר כה יעשה ד' לי וכה יוסיף כי המות יפריד ביני ובינך

Ruth, 1:16-17.

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If love can make me a treasure, I will be your treasure. And if love can make me rich, I will be rich for you.

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset

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LORD GORING (taking hold of her hand): Mabel, I have told you that I love you. Can't you love me a little in return?

MABEL CHILTERN: You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about ... anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Every one in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder that you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband