I was irritable, Kent was taciturn, Damien was withdrawn, and Bryan was downright sullen. It was hard to tell if Roderick had any sort of mood upon him; he did not seem like the type to inflict his humors on his companions.
A truth comes out when it must; A dream comes true when it will. Though the world turn to ash and dust A secret’s a secret still.
Manufactured – synthetic – even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be – I would love you.
Love is a popular romantic notion that leads to nothing but its own brand of misery.
I realized a long time ago, with a certain amazement, that no mattter how important something is in your life, no matter how huge it is, how much space it takes up in your heart and in your thoughts, unless you mention it to other people, they have no idea it exists.
And if I should leave you, for any reason,” he added, tightening his grip as she struggled to free her hand, “I will return to you. That is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow morning and the thunderbolt falling tomorrow night. That is as sure as the god’s existence. I will come back to you, or I will find you – over and over again, as often as we are parted, until the end of the world itself.
You can hardly walk up to complete strangers and say, “Good for you! You’ve risked banishment and brutality and ostracism just to be together, and I applaud your choice! You’re in the vanguard of social change, and even though it’s hard on you, the generations that come after you will have an easier time of it because you were brave enough to fall in love.” So instead I told them I liked their baby. It means the same thing, but it’s more socially acceptable.
No such thing as too tall,” she said. She had automatically reached for a brush and now she began uncoiling the tangles of my hair. “It’s good for a woman to be able to look into a man’s eyes. Then she’s not afraid to tell him what she thinks.
You’re wasting your time, she wanted to tell them. I don’t care about your cars or your properties or your bags of gold. What have you done with your life? What are you going to do with it? That’s all that matters.
She was not who she wanted to be. And not only did she not know how to make herself over into someone else, she wasn’t even sure who she wanted to become.
The debt of friendship is never collected,” he interrupted. “And nothing is ever owed.
I am your friend. I will not fail you at your darkest hour. For this, more than the prestige, he had always wanted to be a Rider – for this utter, bone-deep sense of commitment to a unit and an ideal.
I think we broaden our minds and our experiences if we can learn to embrace things that at one point filled us with revulsion.
If you did leave,′ he said. ‘If you did simply walk out the doors and stroll down the mountain, leaving behind no word of where you were going or why, I would come looking for you. I would never stop looking for you. I would find you, too.
Because I was raised to believe that every man has a responsibility, and the strongest man has the heaviest responsibilities...
I am not like other women. I do not like the things they like or feel the things they feel. And it is better so. I do not want to be like them. I do not want to turn into one of them.
Why had the counterfeit timbre of his voice rung true to me? What had prompted me to believe a man who spent most of his life dissembling? Why had I, usually so suspicious, become so credulous and simpleminded in his presence? Was it just that I had wanted to hear someone tell me he loved me? Was it just that the words he spoke, the vows he swore, were so freighted with sweetness that they would have seemed true no matter who spoke them?
I could come up with no answer. He had kissed my hand. The forces of gravity came unraveled; there was no cohesion at the core of the world, no order in the universe. Clouds and trees and birds and suns spun around of their own volition, freed from their laws and routines. Bryan had kissed my hand. I could not be rational; and so nothing in the world would make sense again.
I did no such thing as sit there with my mouth open, though I may as well have, since I felt as if my mind was gaping. It had simply never occurred to me to wonder what kind of person I was, what kind of person I wanted to be. I had not envisioned this as something I had any control over, just as I could not alter the round shape of my face or the dense black curl of my hair.
You do not decide first if you want to live in a village or a court. You decide if that is the man you want to live with, and then you say yes or no.