The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.