Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...
It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were.
Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.
He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish.
Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. We.
For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.
It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.
It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes – hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. Rabih.
The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself – and in their own way a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we dare to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable. A.
What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly ‘whole’.
Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.
A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one, a silence with an attractive one leaves you certain it is you who are impossibly dull.
The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons”.
Alice loved in order to make up for her own insufficiencies, she searched in others for qualities she aspired to, respected but lacked. Her emotional needs were like a puzzle incomplete without a segment brought by another but the dimensions of the void altered in response to self-development, the piece which fitted at fifteen would no longer fit at thirty. The gap redrew its contours, and unless the puzzle-person kept up she would be left to divorce or awkwardly force the issue.
Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.
Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of “the wretchedness of man’s situation,” and poured scorn on “all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.
Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.
Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it does not simplify the process of possessing or appreciating it.
Any sadness I might have felt, any suspicion that happiness or understanding was unattainable, seemed to find ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings and low skies tinged orange by the city’s streetlights.
Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person; he has opened his heart to her; and he has been accepted. But he is, of course, nowhere yet. He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.