Almost Heaven

 "I've hurt you terribly my love, and I'll hunt you again during the next fifty years. And you are going to hurt me, Ian-never I hope as much as you are hurting me now. But if that's the way it has to be, then I'll endure it, because the only alternative is to live without you, and that is no life at all. And the difference is that I know it, and you don't... not yet..."

 "If you would take one step forward, darling, you could cry in my arms. And while you do, I'll tell you how sorry I am for everything I've done -" Unable to wait, Ian caught her, pulling her tightly against him. "And when I'm finished," he whispered hoarsely as she wrapped her arms around him and wept brokenly, "you can help me find a way to forgive myself."
Tortured by her tears, he clasped her tighter and rubbed his jaw against her temple, his voice a ravaged whisper: "I'm sorry," he told her. He cupped her face between his palms, tipping it up and gazing into her eyes, his thumbs moving over her wet cheeks. "I'm sorry." Slowly, he bent his head, covering her mouth with his. "I'm so damned sorry."

 With his current mood, Elizabeth realized, she was going to have to make her own opening. Lifting her eyes to his enigmatic golden ones, she said quietly, "Ian, have you ever wanted something very badly-something that was within your grasp-and yet you were afraid to reach out for it?"
Surprised by her grave question and her use of his name, Ian tried to ignore the jealousy that had been eating at him all night. "No," he said, scrupulously keeping the curtness from his voice as he gazed down at her alluring face. "Why do you ask? Is there something you want?"
Her gaze fell from his, and she nodded at his frilled white shirtfront.
"What is it you want?
"You."

 "Listen carefully to me, darling, because I'm giving you fair warning that I won't let you do this to us. You gave me your love, and I will not let you take it away. The harder you try, the harder I'll fight you. I'll haunt your dreams at night, exactly the way you have haunted mine every night I was away from you. You'll lie awake in bed at night, wanting me, and you'll know I'm lying awake wanting you. And when you can't stand it anymore you'll come back to me and I'll be there waiting for you. I'll cry in your arms, and I'll tell you I'm sorry for everything I have done and you'll help me find a way to forgive myself."

Bitter Virgin

When I am really scared I can’t say a word. And so I give an inaudible scream.

But miracles are things that can disappear instantly.

Tell him I said to become a good man. Cry a lot. Worry a lot. Become a man worthy enough to make me envious. Yes, even if your love is one that is not returned.

The O.C.

The sooner you realize things will never be the same again, the sooner you can move on.

There is nothing scarier than getting someting you want because then, you have something to lose.

She can't fall if you aren't there to catch her.

But I guess life's not really like that... You can't get caught up in wishing for something that's not gonna happen. You have to hold on to the next best thing.

I can’t change where I am from, but I can change where I am going.

Material Queen

I know, you guys must hate a person like me. But I don't care. Because what kind of life you want, is your own choice. Just like every woman would have to decide: Love or Bread. When you can only choose from the two of them, I only want to choose a better life. The reason is really simple. a life without love, is only living ordinarily. But a life without bread is one can't live on.

In this world, nothing can be perfect. That's a miracle, which I don't believe in. 

Because I love you is the cheapest gift on earth. No ID Card can prove it. No warranty. You can't preserve it. It can only decline in value. Love is just a scent. It will eventually be wiped out. But a jewel can last forever. 

Vital Signs

     We walk the paths we choose.
     He says not to list the patients we save but the ones we don't kill.

Water Bound

 Here's to many more firsts and many more great memories.
 For the first time in his existence, he knew he was drowning and he wasn't thinking about survival.
 He felt safe with her. He'd never been safe with another human being, not since he'd been taken as a child from his home. He'd never been able to trust. He could never give that last small piece - all that was left of his humanity - into someone else's keeping. And now there was Rikki. She let him be whatever he had to be to survive. She didn't ask anything of him. There was no hidden motive. No agenda. Just acceptance. She was different - imperfect, or so she thought - and she knew what it was like to fight to carve out a space for herself. She was willing for him to do that.
 I know what it's like to battle everyday  of my life, just for acceptance, just to survive. And may be that was love. Being so vulnerable and allowing someone else in so far they could hurt you, but they also give you everything.
 If you allowed yourself to hear or feel amusement, you would hear and feel pain.

Flipped

The silence connected us in a way words never could.

A Summer To Remember

     And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn," he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. "And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder."
     "Every...woman," the old lady said, "loves a ...rogue."
      But it was possible to teach what one could not practice.
      This time her heart would not break, even though it would hurt and hurt for a long time to come. Perhaps for the rest of her life. But it would not break. She had the strength to go on alone.
     "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."
     "The people we love are usually stronger than we give them credit for. It is the nature of love, perhaps, to want to shoulder all the pain rather than see the loved one suffer. But sometimes pain is better than emptiness. I have been so empty Kit. All my life. So full of emptiness. That is strange paradox is it not -  full of emptiness?"
     "But I was a dreamer, you see, not a weakling."
     "I have always been a spectator of life, you know, never a participant. Never. But now I am. Today I am, and I an awed and deliriously happy. This is the adventure I asked for, the adventure I am having I will be forever grateful to you.  

Lie to me

   If she leaves like this, it's a coincidence. If I can hold her its fate
   Since it's so beautiful, even if it changes, I hope it will change slowly. So we won't miss a single thing and can be amazed by all of it.
   Being dissapointed in someone doesn't feel very good.
   Most people change be it in a good way or a bad way.

Simply Perfect

"Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams?"

"But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all."

 "But that is what life is all about, he said. "It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love."

"Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives."

"Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments."

"I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise.

"Love does not last forever, then?"
"He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.

"Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain."

"It is also for stepping into the unknown," Claudia said, "when it would be easier to cling what it familiar and safe."

"Sometimes now was enough
Sometimes it was everything."

"And so silence and ...darkness hold happiness and joy?" he said softly.
"Assuredly," she said, "provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything."

Simply Magic

"Sometimes even the imagination lets one down."

"Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude."

"Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?"

"The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?"

"There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not."

"Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing."

"Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken."

"And he knew at that moment that love world never die, that it would never fade away altogether. The time might come when he would meet and marry someone else. He might even be reasonably happy. But there would always be a deep precious place in his heart that belonged to his first real love."

"Sometimes love was to be grasped in any form and in any manner it was offered. And sometimes love must be given in the same way."

"Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?"

"There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness. Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is. I know it is something of a cliche to say that love makes all things possible, but I believe it does. It is not a magic wand that can be waved over life to make it all sweet and lovely and trouble free, but it can give the energy to fight the odds and win."

Whitney, My Love

 "You will soon discover that in matters of the heart, memories are much kinder than reality."
 "We all do foolish things when we are in love. Don't we, your grace?"
 "Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when  we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality."
 "I want more from life than that and I have more to give."
 "Sometimes it just happens - to the wrong people at the wrong time."

The Pilot's Wife

     But how do you ever know that you know a person?
     Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
     To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
     To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.
     And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.
     Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be.
     In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

The Wedding

"I do. Love you, I mean."
"Frugalities, I've learned, has its own cost, one that sometimes lasts forever."
"I came to the conclusion that unrealized hopes, even small ones, were always wrenching."
"Gifts of the heart can't be claimed by anyone except the giver."
"Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time."
"Yet I have come to believe that while the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of is are malleable..."

Then Comes Seduction

'Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?'

'But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?'

'He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its  derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.'

'Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?'

'Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?
How could she have felt like that without love?
Was love essential?
Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?
If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.
Must she make do with this instead, then?
Only this?
Pleasure without love?'

'Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo.
It just simply was.'

'I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.'

'This has been a birthday best forgotten.'
'Most birthdays are, milord,' his man said agreeably