• You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find.”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • “Well, I never did, but that’s what he claimed. He’ll never marry,” Eve said. “Why do you say that?” “I know it. He’s selfish, but it isn’t selfishness. He’s not afraid of being alone.”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • “You’re not going to get married, are you?” she said. “Well, of course I think about it.” “It’s not necessary for you. You already have the fruit of marriage.”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • There were times she hated him because he was free in a way she was not; he had no children, no wife.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • One of the most potent surprises is how my relationship with David didn’t end when we stopped being with each other, or even when I fell in love with someone else. I still think about him nearly every day. I still feel the vibrations of forces that I can’t understand — forces, like love and grief and pain, that sit somewhere beyond the limits of language — and these aren’t just memories of feelings but new ones, always new. Our relationship exists, still, somewhere. This, like everything else, is very painful, and accepting it has brought me a kind of liberation that I didn’t think was possible.

    against nature

    Rayne-fisher quinn

  • At least, this is what it has done for me. My relationship with David, like nearly all relationships, felt cataclysmic, world-shifting, inconceivable to anyone outside of it, incomprehensible even to ourselves. We felt certain, like nearly everyone in nearly all relationships, that no one in history had ever experienced anything like it. (If this is what love feels like for everyone else, I wondered, how does anyone get anything done? How does the world keep turning? Who keeps the lights on?) We recognized this as silly and naive but knew there was no point in resisting; to desire, as we know, is to submit to being made a fool. 

    against nature

    Rayne-fisher quinn

  • She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • “The very best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse.”

    ― Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier

  • “Your ideal partner is not someone you never disagree with but someone you are glad to disagree with.”

    ― Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier

  • Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

    What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

    —James Baldwin