dal principio

You want someone who's sensitive to your needs, but still decisive enough for the occasional grope in the closet.

Relationships are stories. When you pick a partner, you pick a story. And sometimes you find yourself recruited for a play you didn't audition for.

As if the weather had been listening, a cold wind blew over the fells then, and it made her wince as it buffetted her hair. Eugene opened the wall of his body and patted his big chest like it was where she belonged. She was too elegant to crawl. So Agnes stood, teetering on her black heels, and crossed the blanket to lie against him.  She closed her eyes as he folded his arms around her and held her safe. They sat that way for a very long time, not speaking, as they watched the slow gloam fall over the city. She was warm in his embrace, and she leaned back and trusted in the solidness of him. He rubbed the coldness from her shins, and she watched the freckles on his fingers as they slowly traced the sharp bone in her knee.  When he kissed her gently, she closed her eyes again and happily forgot all about the promise not to show him her udnerwear.

It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He has brought us to a place we didn't belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.

I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

With only a little subterfuge he can live two entirely separate existences, never confronting the ultimate question of what to do with himself or what kind of person he is.

One's thought patterns become different... when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

“What could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

love... unconditional... it's both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.

Noticing details, that was good. Tiny silvers of life — they all added up and helped you to feel that you, too, could be a fragment, a little piece of humanity who usefully filled space, however minuscule.

“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”

There was still something between us — friendship, inside jokes, a closeness born of many crises suffered together — but whatever we had, it was unfair to love to call it love.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.