George Bernard Shaw

“ THE SERPENT. Choose a day for your death; and resolve to die on that day. Then death is no longer uncertain but certain. Let Eve vow to love you until your death. Then love will be no longer uncertain.
ADAM. Yes: that is splendid: that will bind the future.
EVE [displeased, turning away from the serpent] But it will destroy hope.
ADAM [angrily] Be silent, woman. Hope is wicked. Happiness is wicked. Certainty is blessed.
THE SERPENT. What is wicked? You have invented a word.
ADAM. Whatever I fear to do is wicked. Listen to me, Eve; and you, snake, listen too, that your memory may hold my vow. ”

“ ADAM. If I put off death until tomorrow, I shall never die. There is no such day as tomorrow, and never can be.
THE SERPENT. I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.
ADAM. If I am to overtake death, I must appoint a real day, not a tomorrow. When shall I die?
EVE. You may die when I have made another Adam. ”

“ The voice in the garden is your own voice.
ADAM. It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.
EVE. The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.
ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish] Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word—
THE SERPENT. Love. Love. Love.
ADAM. That is too short a word for so long a thing.
THE SERPENT [laughs] !!! ”