I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.
Sometimes she felt that her heart would ssurely break. But she knew that hearts did not literally break because their owners were unhappy – and foolish. How dreadfully foolish she had been. Yet she clung to the memories as to a lifeline.
Idleness was so often despised. And yet it was on idleness, she knew, that one touched meaning and peace.
Why is it,” she asked, snuggling closer, “that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
I am free, you see,” she said, “to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. That is why I love you, and it is the way I love you.
But it was possible to teach what one could not practice.
Would she be able to bear never seeing him again? Never in this life?
Life was very sad if there were not – and unbearably so if one’s experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic.
People, especially some religious people. would have us believe that it is wrong. even a sin, to love oneself. It is not. It is the basic, essential love. If you do not love yourself, you cannot possibly love anyone else. Not fully and truly.
Why was it that silence sometimes felt like a physical thing with a weight of its own?
Fear must be challenged, I have found. It is a powerful beat if it is allowed the mastery.
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
He loved me,” she said, her voice leaden. “It is so easy to take love for granted when one has always had it. I knew he loved me as I loved him, but I did not realize perhaps how much until all love was removed.
Hugo could cheerfully have died of mortification – if such a mass of contradictions had been possible.