The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

Hayes frames love not as a pleasant accessory to life but as its final measure of worth—“terminal dignity,” the last dignity that remains when status, achievement, and even narrative fall away. By downplaying “the story of a love,” she shifts attention from romance-as-plot to love-as-capacity: an inner moral and spiritual aptitude that can be exercised in many forms (romantic, familial, compassionate, self-giving). The closing thought—love as a “glimpse…of eternity”—suggests that love momentarily lifts human experience beyond time and contingency, offering a foretaste of something enduring. The quote thus elevates love from sentiment to metaphysical evidence: what feels most lasting in us hints at what might be lasting beyond us.