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