The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Indifference emotionally, indifference physically.

No one, though, has any idea of the churn of a secret life. Your desire to crash catastrophe into your world is like a tugging at your shirt. But only sometimes, and then its gone. With the offer of a bath, or a cup of tea, or the dishes done.

You don't have, any more, a sanctuary in kindness and good deeds and surrender; you're changing, you can feel the souring. A thrill plumes through you when couples split, a feeling that order's restored, that it's the way we're all meant to be, alone.
...

What have you become? Unhinged, no longer a doormat, just like everyone else?

"'Poor greenheads', wrote the Puritan Daniel Rogers of those who married purely for love when a year or two had passed and they had skimmed the cream of their marriage, they would soon envy the good fortune of those whose union was built on stronger foundations."

"She [Lettice Morrison] was an exceptional character, not only for her beauty, but also for a genuine love of study, which marked her out from most girls of her time: 'oft-times at a book in her Closet when she was thought to be in bed'."

... Frances Purbeck, the wife sought 'for wealth', and Robert Howard, who sought her for love.

"He saw that interests weren't always a sexy thing. A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love;"

"Grandmother Kane and Grandmother Cabot said they would never travel in such an infernal contraption, and they never did, although many years later Grandmother Kane was driven to her funeral in a motor car, but was not informed of that fact."
Lol

“Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”

"If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it."

"Your head empties of everything else," he went on. "Whole hours go by. Without moving you wander through lands that you imagine you can actually see, and entwined with the story your mind gets involved with the detailed descriptions, or follows the twists and turns of adventures. It mingles with the characters; it seems as if it is your own heart that beats beneath their clothes."

"Yet shouldn't a man know everything, excel at many different pursuits, introduce you to the power of the passions, the niceties of life, to all its mysteries? This man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing."

"Before she got married she had believed she was in love. But when the happiness that should have come from this love didn't materialize, she thought she had made a mistake. And so Emma tried to understand exactly what was meant in real life by the words bliss, passion and rapture, which had always sounded so beautiful in books."

"You cannot tame a wild animal, because it will always remember where it is from, and yearn to go back."

❤️

"But then, I tell myself, vanity is one of the attributes that distinguish us from animals, so perhaps we should be proud of it."

"So that's how it happens: mutual need is what makes people co-operate; nothing to do with trust or kindness or any such sentimental notion."

Murder, corruption, infidelity, abuse... no. There's something more. Something true in it. It's honest. It's sophisticated. It is what I love.
There was a lot of action in it. It was real action. Not the one making your heart pound, but one to make you question yourself.

"But then we live in a time in which all horror has been commodified into entertainment."

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Man has a horror of aloneness - not physical aloneness: no one fears that, in ordinary degree at least. Mental, spiritual, emotional, social aloneness is, however, very different.

'There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.'

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