Most of our caste in this country, if they only knew it, are Confucian rather than Christian. Belief in ancestors, and tradition, respect for parents… - John Galsworthy

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them sitting there. Ah! and the atmosphere — even now, of too many stuffs and washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees’ wings. ‘No,’ he thought, ‘there’s nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.’ And, by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day hollow — to-day with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and their “So longs,” and their “Old Beans,” and their laughter — girls who gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him the shudders too. No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and reverence for past and future.

Love! Beyond meaure - beyond death - it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.