It is just a pity,” he added, “that some things can never be entirely forgotten just by trying. But we have all learned that lesson.
If there was magic alive in this world, Julian thought after the first couple of minutes, it was surely present in the waltz danced with someone one loved more than life itself.
If she allowed herself to wallow in self-pity, she would be in danger of becoming one of those habitual moaners and complainers everyone avoided.
I Know what you meant when you told me she was full of love and brimming over with it. And so innocent that one fears for her. Perhaps we ought not to fear for such people but for ourselves whose experience has taught us not to trust one another or life itself.
But one never quite reached the point at which one could relax and know that one had made it through to the other side of suffering and could now be simply content, even happy, inside a balanced mix of body, mind, and spirit.
It is the human condition. No one escapes, even those who may appear to others to live charmed lives. But we all have the choice of whether to be defined by the negatives in our lives or to make of our present and future and our very selves what we want them to be.
She had held her life to an even keel by killing all deep feeling, by living upon the surface of life.
What do you not have, Lord Hardford?” she asked. “For no one has everything, you know, or even nearly everything.
If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle.
Insults are only really effective,” she said, “when the person insulted cares for the good opinion of the insulter.
But he was well aware that the future could never be relied upon to be an improvement upon the present. The future did not exist. Only the present did.
Ben walked into the house and up the stairs with his two canes, but he propelled himself about much of the time after that in a wheeled chair, having decided that it was not an admission of defeat but rather a moving forward into a new, differently active phase of his life.
We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.
It is part of you, and you are a man worth knowing.
We women are impractical because we have hearts. Not that men do not, but they feel things differently. They do not feel the suffering around them, or, if they do, they know how to harden their hearts when it has nothing to do with them.
He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done.
I do not understand dalliance, Lord Ponsonby.” “But you are d-drawn to it, Mrs. Keeping.
Why is it we are not constantly awed by the size and majesty of the universe?” “Habit,” he said. “We are accustomed to it. I suppose if we had been blind from birth – in both eyes – and could suddenly see, we would be so overwhelmed by a night like this that we would either gaze upward at it until dawn or else cling to the earth, afraid that we were about to fall off. Or perhaps we would simply assume that we were at the center of it all and the lords of all we beheld.” The.
He watched her go, wondering if life ever offered happiness in more than very small, very brief doses. T.
But all through life, it seems, we have to learn and relearn the lesson of loving people unconditionally, no matter what.