#mrgolightly

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have coped with this till now. You can’t hurry the leaves on the trees – things have their own way of happening. I couldn’t, I mean, you’ve been … no one could’ve, really …’

She looked at him – and he looked back levelly. In another existence, she thought, you and I could have been partners, cellmates and soulmates.

‘The thing is, you see,’ he said, ‘we’ll always have this, here … we’ll know it, like the sheep and the leer…’

And that was true, too. Real love isn’t mush, she thought, it isn’t spongy sentiment or sanctimonious milk and water – it is knowledge unspoken, subtle, and illimitable as the weather: tacit, unassailable, lawless, inviolable. It is difficult precisely because it doesn’t – won’t – die; it’s a power stronger than reason, because it laughs at the neediness of reason.

  Salley Vickers  -  “Mr. Golightly’s Holiday