LOVE—“Isn’t that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace
conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon
and white scent-heavy flowers at night? * * * You talk about love. What
a strange, restricted growth it is with you. You don’t know what the
real thing means, you who think passion is bad taste because you are not
tempted, you to whom the physical side is a degrading extra.” * * * When
he was with her now he stammered. He didn’t know that a stammer is the
divine eloquence of love.
PASSION—Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select
her victims. How many a would-be Juliet waits in vain for those consuming
fires her heart is longing for, while they blaze in the reluctant hearts
of Mr. Adrian Roses, who only ask to be left in peace, far from the
ridiculous and, thank God, equally far from the sublime. Are men in love
like this:
“She was the first person he had ever loved. He had trembled when he
touched her. His spasms of passion had been like spasms of pain, his face
contorted and his voice rough, and then there had followed intervals of
wretched shyness. When he had thought of possessing her he had become a
saint waiting for a divine manifestation.”
MARRIAGE—“We just are hopelessly unsuited to each other. Do you seriously
think that you want a wife like me?” * * * “Marriage will modify you.” *
* * “Marriage might modify me if I married the right man. Marriage to you
would bring out everything you hate.” * * * “Helena, do you realize that
I love you?” “You don’t know what love means.” * * * “Of course I don’t.
If I did I might want to marry you.”
PROTEST AGAINST REALISM—“What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to
do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible. When I love,
what do I want? I want never to have kissed, never to have given myself
before. It is in vain, I say—‘Never before was I awake—I was a dummy in
the hands of fate—now I am alive.’ I was shut up perhaps, but my outer
petals were touched. Oh, my God, make me again the child I was—but He
cannot answer.”
DISILLUSIONMENT—What are we to tell our children? How are they to know
that the first accidental encounter with life may take from them a
treasure they will only learn about in forty storm-tossed years? Those
first gifts—those shy blossomings lovely in their unconsciousness—are
surely but the squandering of something half alive, the foolish murder
of a bud. Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing, eating miracles with its
breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.
WHAT A WOMAN WANTS—“I don’t want anything except to be wanted. I long for
you to make ceaseless, impossible demands on me.”
THE GOAL OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT—“All my life I have been teased for asking
not, ‘Is she beautiful?’ ‘Is she clever?’ but always ‘Is she happy?’
I think it is in many ways the most interesting thing about a person.
* * * Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a
personality. I always feel it is a creation that is difficult for some
and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.”
* * * * *