“I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez · Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985
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You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you.
About this quote
Meaning
This declaration is remarkable for its completeness. The speaker is not offering a careful, measured affection but a total surrender, one that encompasses the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual. The triple repetition of the word love gives the sentence a breathless, almost uncontrollable quality, as though the feeling is too large to be stated only once.
Context
This line is spoken by Mr. Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813. It comes during a moment of intense emotional honesty between two characters who have spent much of the novel misreading and misjudging each other. Darcy's confession is significant not just as a romantic declaration but as a sign of genuine transformation: a proud man fully humbled by his own feelings. The novel as a whole is concerned with the relationship between social expectation and personal feeling, and this line sits at the heart of that tension.
About the author
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works are among the most enduringly popular in the history of British literature. Writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she focused on domestic life, courtship, and the social pressures facing women of her era. Her novels combine sharp social observation with genuine warmth and romantic feeling. Austen published her major works anonymously during her lifetime and received only modest recognition at the time, but her reputation grew enormously in the decades after her death, and she is now considered one of the central figures in the English literary tradition.
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