Books Featuring an Unequal Love Dynamic

[Meagan]

Hey everyone! I need some helpful suggestions from you.

I work for a publishing company and we're putting together an artist book to accompany a film that is yet to be released. The film features a male-robot who is so devoted to his female-robot love interest that he removes his mechanical parts and gives them to her one by one until he's left with only a head. Strange, I know, but the director has made some great films in the past, so as weird as it sounds I think it'll be a well-executed and worthwhile project.

On to the question at hand-- I've been tasked with collecting passages to accompany film stills from the movie to be published in this artist book. I'm looking for really poignant passages about loving too much; that unrequited, obsessive type of love that compels you to abdicate whole parts of yourself, leaving you with nothing (except, maybe, an odd sense of fulfillment). The movie, according to the director, is like a robot love-story version of The Giving Tree, to give you a frame of reference for where the director's head is at with this.

Well? Any suggestions?

[Trevor]

May be worth watching or reading the Bicentennial Man by Issac Asimov. In this film an android is blessed with the love for the family to which he belongs. He also has a particular love for a character he knows as "Little Miss" and finally has another love for Galatia, a robot which his creator has also made. All of these feelings can be described as love but they are a variety of differing love !!

[Amanda]

"If music be the food of love, play on, give excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! It had a dying fall; O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor." Twelfth Night I.i

[Trevor]

It lies not in our power to love, or hate,
For will in us is over-rulde by fate.
When two are stript long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win.
And one especially doo we affect,
Of two gold Ingots like in each respect,
The reason no man knowes, let it suffise,
What we behold is censur’d by our eyes.
Where both deliberat, the love is slight,
Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?

Christopher Marlow 1598 Hero and Leander

[Wes, Moderator]

Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all