Tuesday, May 7, 2013

The Proposal

- When one had once suffered a great hurt, there was always a weakness afterward, a vulnerability where there had been wholeness and strength before - and innocence.

- She had never believed in fate. She still did not. It would be nonsense of freedom of will and choice, and it was through such freedom that we worked our way through life and learned what we needed to learn.  But sometimes, it seemed to her, there was something, some sign, to nudge one along in a certain direction.  What one chose to do with that nudge was up to that person.

- "Why say something," he asked her, "if your words mean nothing?

- "Have you noticed," she asked him, "how standing still can sometimes be no different from moving backward? For the whole world moves on and leaves one behind."

- "Some things," she said, "are best not known for sure, Lord Trentham."

- He asked me not to kill myself - asked, not told. His wife had done that, he told me, and it was in a sense the ultimate act of selfishness since it left behind untold and endless suffering for those who had witnessed it and been unable to do anything to prevent it. And so I remained alive.

- I think it is more that the sea is a reminder of how little control we have over our own lives no matter how carefully we try to plan and order them. Everything changes in ways we least expect, and everything is frighteningly vast. We are so small.

- When we lash out at ourselves for having lost control, we are reminded that we never can be in total control, that all life asks of us is to do our best to cope with what is handed to us.

- Fear must be challenged, I have found. It is a powerful beast if it is allowed the mastery.

- He wished he understood women better. It was a well-known fact that they did not mean half of what they said.

- But which half did they mean?

- Hugo could cheerfully have died of mortification - if such a mass of contradictions had been possible.
- "I came," he said.
Good Lord! If there were an orator-of-the-year award, he would be in dire danger of winning it.

- Why was it that silence sometimes felt like a physical thing with a weight of its own?

- Youthful dreams are precious things. They ought not to be dashed as foolish and unrealistic just because they are young dreams. Innocence ought not to be destroyed from any callous conviction that a realistic sort of cynicism is better.

- One cannot try marriage. Once one is in, there is no way out.

- "Stanbrook once told me," he said, "that suicide is the worst kind of selfishness, as it is often a plea to specific people who are left stranded in the land of the living, unable for all eternity to answer the plea

- He offered his arm and she took it. And the world was the same place.
And forever different.

- "That is the excitement of life," he said when he was finished. "The not knowing. It is often best not to know.

- "I do not believe there is right or wrong," he said. "there is only doing what one must do under given circumstances and living with the consequences and weaving every experiences, good and bad, into the fabric of one's life so that ultimately one can see the pattern of it all and accept the lessons life has taught.

- 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.

- You will find that wanting, even loving, is not enough.

- There is no such place as the promised land, but it would be foolish to reject even an unpromised land as worthless without first inspecting it thoroughly.

- It was what remained to a relationship after the first euphoria of the romance had faded.

- Your sense of guilt will linger. It will always be part of you. but sharing it, allowing people to love you anyway, will do you the world of good. Secrets need an outlet if they are not to fester and become an unbearable burden.

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