The beautiful thing about marriage is the right it gives me to monogamy. One man intent on dictating my whereabouts is enough, wouldn’t you think?
Forty-nine is extremely young. If forty-nine is not young, that would make me old, and I am not old. I have reached the age of maturity to which all humans must particularly aspire; to dismiss this pinnacle of perfection as old age is to demean all of humankind.
One mustn’t justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat.
I wasn’t going to be a bit of rubbish just because he discarded me.
You anchor me without holding me down. You frighten me without threatening my future. You’re unflinchingly devoted. I love you.
Do you suppose I would learn you the way a scholar learns a book? That you are nothing to me but a collection of suppositions, to be stored in my memory and written down for verification? No, Margaret. I know you.
He’d started caring more about becoming the kind of person who could make a change than he cared about the change itself.
Does anyone ever get the best of you?” “Yes,” she returned, “but only when I choose to give it to them.
There is no point getting angry at a bad hand, he had used to say. Especially if the dealer cheated when distributing the cards. Anger leads to mistakes. Don’t get angry; that’s what they want. Get calm. They’ll never expect you to do that. Don’t get angry; get creative. Take the hand you have and see whether you might not be holding something your enemy has overlooked. Don’t get angry at the cards; get the dealer out of the game.
She received his note not two minutes later. She opened it, her heart pounding. But there were only two words on the paper. Marry me.
I would never interrupt you,” he told her. “I love it when you talk Sweetly to me.
She felt as if she’d opened a door on what she believed was a towering monster, only to find it five inches tall.
He wasn’t good with this sort of thing – with the back-and-forth dance between man and woman. He wasn’t even sure if they were dancing, or if she was merely being polite.
It’s one thing to flirt with someone you’ve never met. But these? These are actual feelings. I’m not sure what they mean or what to do with them.
I have looked high.” Her voice was an urgent whisper. “And I have fallen farther than you can imagine. So don’t you lecture me. All I want is to pretend that this is enough – that I can be satisfied by the scraps that remain to me. ” He had.
She wanted him to be right. She needed him to be wrong. And while that sounded as if she were confused, confusion implied uncertainty. And Margaret was dead certain that he was both the last man on earth that she should kiss, and the only one she dreamed of holding.
I fear that one day I will no longer understand desperation, and with that, I will slowly stop listening to what others have to say.
They said that hell had no fury like a woman scorned, but they were wrong. Women were scorned again and again and again. It was only after the seventieth scorning that they let loose a fraction of their righteous anger. Frankly, men had no idea how lucky they were that any woman was rational at all.
Have you ever seen a cat attempt to pounce on a target, and miss? And what does the cat do? It acts as if it intended to miss. ‘Yes,’ it says. ‘I let that one go as a warning to all the others. Now I shall lick my paws for the next five minutes, precisely as I had planned.
But the sort of honor Richard was talking about was flattery, not truth. It wasn’t real. Honor that was given to you because of how you were born – that was just a delusion. She wasn’t going to rely on Parliament – or the people around her – to provide an assessment of herself. They were fickle and untrustworthy.