She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.

She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Ella encontró siempre la manera de rechazarlo porque aunque no conseguía quererlo, ya no podía vivir sin el.

her greatest sorrow was that she could find no one to love in return, since all the men were much too stupid and ugly to mate

She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.

Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead...

It was a pity that with his great qualities, his unselfishness and honor, his intelligence and sensibility, he should be so unlovable.

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.

I love him, oh! I love him; but he won't let himself be loved.

He was there beside her; yet she was far away from him, alone with her outraged love and her ruined life.

She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.

In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak.