Books that smolder

MANILA, Philippines - Let’s face it, we live in prosaic times. Nobody’s ever going to carve down the wedding vows of Kim Kardashian and her short-lived hubby on a tree somewhere. The good stuff lasts, the rest mulches away like yesterday’s pulp fiction. So you really can’t go wrong with the classics. Who can argue with love spoken so truly, so firmly, it almost trembles?

• “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” — Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

• “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” — Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• “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. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.” — Persuasion by Jane Austen

• “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” — The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.” — Hamlet by William Shakespeare