Meaning of “I could not love thee, Dear, so much,…”

The Conscious Lovers, represented in Project Gutenberg #55922, Indiana speaking to Bevil Jr. The play was first performed and published in 1722. The sentence is fictional character dialogue and is therefore preserved under Indiana’s local dramatic voice rather than flattened into Steele autobiography.

Ruth 1:16 in the King James Version; Ruth’s pledge to Naomi.

Indian Summer of a Forsyte, represented in Project Gutenberg #2594. Irene says the line to old Jolyon while speaking about her dead lover; it is emotionally charged fictional dialogue, and the surrounding conversation immediately gives old Jolyon a more ironic response.

All for Love, represented by Project Gutenberg #2062. Dolabella speaks the line while reflecting on Antony’s passion and his own conflicting attraction to Cleopatra. It is dramatic character speech inside a tragedy, not Dryden autobiography or a universal developmental claim.

Miss Billy, Chapter XVI, ‘Kate Takes a Hand,’ Project Gutenberg #3266. The line ‘It's home—all the home there is—anywhere!’ occurs at the end of the chapter after Billy decides to leave the Henshaw household because she fears disrupting it; Chapter XVII begins immediately afterward. It is Billy Neilson's distressed fictional speech about a specific domestic conflict, not a general rule about family, belonging or housing.

Hero and Leander, posthumously published in 1598. The sentence is a narrator’s rhetorical claim inside mythological narrative poetry and should not be treated as psychological evidence about how real relationships develop.