“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”
Audrey Hepburn
This line expresses the feeling that two people are made of the same essential material, that at the deepest level of their being they are not separate but alike. It goes beyond attraction or affection and reaches toward something more elemental: a shared identity, a kinship of spirit that feels almost metaphysical. The speaker is not saying the two people are similar in personality or taste, but that their very inner nature is the same.
These words are spoken by Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Bronte's only novel, published in 1847. Catherine is describing her bond with Heathcliff, the central relationship of the book, which is as tormented and destructive as it is profound. The novel is set on the Yorkshire moors and explores love, obsession, class, and revenge across two generations. This particular line has outlasted much of the novel's darker material in popular memory because it captures a feeling of soul-level connection that many readers find deeply moving.
Emily Bronte was an English writer who lived during the nineteenth century and published under the pen name Ellis Bell during her lifetime. Wuthering Heights was her only novel, released the year before her death at the age of thirty. She also wrote poetry, some of which is highly regarded. Despite producing a small body of work, her novel secured her a lasting place in English literary history, and she is considered one of the most distinctive voices of the Romantic and early Victorian period.
“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”
Audrey Hepburn
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride.”
Pablo Neruda · Sonnet XVII, 100 Love Sonnets, 1960
“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”
William Shakespeare · Sonnet 18, c. 1609
“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”
Nicholas Sparks · The Notebook, 1996
“You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you.”
Jane Austen · Pride and Prejudice, 1813
“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
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.”
Aristotle · Politics, Book VI, c. 350 BC
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
W.E.B. Du Bois · John Brown, 1909
“I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · The Social Contract, 1762
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
George Bernard Shaw · Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903
“My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”
Thomas Jefferson · Letter to James Monroe, June 17, 1785
“For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?”
Ralph Waldo Emerson · "Boston," poem, 1830s