A Kingdom of Dreams

Behold your new mistress, my wife, and know that when she bids you,I have bidden you. What service you render her, you are rendering me. What loyalty you give or withhold from her, you give or withhold from me!

The groom always smiles proudly because he's convinced he's accomplished something quite wonderful. The bride smiles because she's been able to convince him of it. 

It was a kingdom of dreams - a place where things would be just the way I wanted them to be. 

Jennifer Merrick had stored all her tears inside her, and her pride and courage would never permit her to break down and shed them. 

Why is it when you yield, I feel like the one who has been conquered? 

What is mine, I intend to keep. 

But he knew instinctively what he suggested was impossible. She'd been through so much, and held her tears back for so long, that Royce doubted that anything could force her to shed them. 

After all, it's not every day a woman is given a kingdom of dreams.  

Simply Love

"Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word."

"I am not sure what loneliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone."
   "What do you fear then?" he asked her.
   She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words.
   "Never finding myself again...."

"But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him."

"And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive."

"Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that."

"My mind cannot grasp forever," she told him. "There must surely be an end somewhere. But the big question is-what it beyond the end?"

"My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make. Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong."

"Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it."

"I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy."

"Was there to be some healing after all?
   Was healing possible when grave damage had been done?
   Was wholeness possible when one had been horribly maimed.

"One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest."

"Sometimes," he said, "it is necessary to go back before we can move forward."

"This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite."
   "Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him.
   "Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful..."

"The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love."

Kimi wa petto

The reason for the kite to fly happily in the sky is not because it's free, it's because there's a string that will eventually tug it close.

The World They Live In

And what’s most important is at a situation like this, its hard to tell whether he’s an enemy or a friend.

At least one time, I’ll ask myself honestly have I been an enemy to others?

The comrade by my side right now, can turn into my enemy in one moment. When an enemy is clearly your enemy, that’s not such a dangerous moment. But when you cannot determine whether the person is your enemy or friend, the situation turns dire.

When we don’t need each other anymore, how then should we get on with each other?

When you recognize each other’s strength and weaknesses, it’s not only the thrills of love that can stop. Love itself can end too.

 Unable to understand, that’s why we keep talking. Unable to understand, that’s why we keep our feelings inside our hearts. But actually it’s not because we are unable to understand, it’e because we love each other.

At Last Comes Love

"Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love?" 

"Life was very sad if there were not - and unbearably so if one's experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic." 

"After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life." 

"But there were certain moments in life that forever defined one as a person - in one's own estimation, anyway. And one's own self esteem, when all was said and done, was of far more importance than the fickle esteem of one's peers." 

"Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. It was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift.
He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic.
He was not, though.
He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business.
For receiving meant opening up the heart again.
Perhaps to rejection.
Or disillusionment.
Or pain.
Or even heart break.
It was all terribly risky.
And all terribly necessary.
And of course, there was the whole issue of trust..." 

"There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything."

Yukimi Nabari no Ou

There are three kinds of secrets: something that you hide at the bottom of your heart because you don't want it to be mentioned, something that you can't say even if you want to, and something that you hope someone asks about even though you're hiding it.

Easy Fortune Happy Life

  If love is easy, then living together wouldn’t be. And if living together was easy then loving each other wouldn’t be.

 Whenever two people are together, they can’t avoid being hurt because that is also another expression of their love.