The Book Bitch

“Some things you just naturally want to keep private. Not because they are bad, but because you just want them secret. There are two or three things I wouldn’t want even you to know about.”

To know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living.

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. he must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world - a world intense and strange, complete in himself...It if for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

“All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so artfully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships.”