Thorton Wilder

"But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the 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."

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder
Penguin Books, London, 1987 [1927]
Page 124