(no subject)
"No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service.
Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate.
Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation."
"I had no ingenious revelations only a huge sadness.
I'm not the kind who can replace love with convenience or passion with pick-ups"
"She didn't want to do it but she felt that a writer doesn't make a god companion. 'It's only a matter of time', she said, 'before I become an alcoholic and forget how to cook'. I suggested we wait and try and ride it out. She shook her head sadly and petted me. 'Get a dog'.
"People change things. There are victims of change but not victims of things."
"I will find a clue to you, I will be able to unravel you, pull you between my fingers and stretch out each thread to know the measure of you."
"SELF_RESPECT let cupid try and get past that one."
"I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody."
"We had to say goodbye and although there were some things about her that I missed it was pleasant to walk in the country again without seeing every bush and shrub as a potential assailant."
"I thought, how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it."
"Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said,'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said, 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that the fingerprints would not show, he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love."
"I've been through a lot of marriages. Not down the aisle but always up the stairs. I began to realize I was hearing the same story every time."
"You were careful not to say those words that soon became our private altar."
"the closer I held you to me, the faster you melted away."
" I did think I was doing the right thing and I thought it was for the right reasons. Time has exposed to me a certain stickiness at the centre. What were my heroics and sacrifices really about? Your pig-headedness or my own?"
"Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you and always see you, tell you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?"
"Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, been seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid."
"Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation."
"If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love?"
"I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me. I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures."
"Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time."
"If I rush at this relationship it's because I fear for it. I fear you have a door that I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you'll be gone."
"Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away. The beloved as nitric acid."
"Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is a positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it's no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked."
"Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python."
"I don't want to be your sport nor you to be mine. I don't want to punch you for the pleasure of it, tangling the clear lines that bind us, forcing you to your knees, dragging you up again. The public face of a life in chaos. I want the hoop around our hearts to be a guide not a terror. I don't want to pull you tighter than you can bear. I don't want the lines to slacken either, the thread paying out over the side, enough rope to hang ourselves."
"I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?"
"Is this the proper ending? If not the proper then the inevitable?"
"To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever.You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it.Why would I want them to?"