Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 149

"... who was not spying, hiding, but waiting, watching, for no reward, no thanks, who did not love him in the sense we mean it because there is no love of that sort without hope; who (if it were love) loved with that sort beyond the compass of glib books: that love which gives up what it never had - that pony's modicum which is the donor's all yet whose infinitesimal weight adds nothing to the substance of the loved - yet I gave it. And not to him, to her; it was as though I said to her, 'Here take this too. You cannot love him as he should be loved, and though he will no more feel this giving's weight than he would ever know its lack, yet there may come some moment in your married lives when he will find this atom's particle as you might find a cramped small pallid hidden shoot in a familiar flower bed and pause and say, "Where did this come from?"; you need only answer, "I don't know."' And then I went back home and stayed five years, heard an echoed shot, ran up a nightmare flight of stairs, and found -"