“Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don't mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.”
"But isn’t that what allowing yourself be loved is all about – letting something greater than fear into your life?”
“Sometimes I want to take on the whole world and then there are other times … when all I want is for the world to take care of me.”
“Relationships never truly ended, and even when people faded from you their effect was preserved somewhere in the particle physics of experience where everything is a compound made up of traces of everything else.”
“I think I was in this state where I needed to be surrounded by love but couldn't let it touch me.”
“Let’s not name it. Once you name something, you have to define it: say what it is and isn’t. Not to mention maintenance. All the relationships with names – parent, sister, husband, lover – come with maintenance. All that effort keeping it to what it’s supposed to be. Shouldn’t we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement. How about it, Joseph? How about you just try to make me happy, and I’ll try and do the same for you?”
“To him love was no union between two otherwise incomplete halves, but more like the gravity that locked two bodies into the same orbit.”
“For so long I was afraid to stay close to anybody because I had so much anger and confusion inside me. I knew that I couldn't let anyone into my life until all that had passed. The problem I could never solve was how to relate to people in the meantime. Other people's love is frightening when you're suffering. It's overwhelming. When you're consumed with the effort of processing internal pain, it becomes impossible to do anything else. It's like holding your breath under water: you realise that you need to breathe but if you breathe at the wrong time, you drown. I only survived thanks to the people in my life -- people I repaid by letting them down.”
“You were like a dangerous sun: even at a distance you could still burn me... You were close enough to exist, but never close enough to hold onto.”
“Panenka, guilty of one thing, had by extension become guilty of all things.”
“Habituated loneliness was bearable, but the heart was not built to endure glimpses of what it could never truly have.”
“There were times, she would admit, when for all her heroic independence, her sacred resilience, she would have liked to trust her weight to the love of another person like that. To fall backwards in absolute security. But she had only known doubting love. Love that needed to be weighed against what it cost. She was exhausted. Everything was so hard.”
“But it was too late. He had already slipped into a deep depression and developed a dangerous indifference to himself. To describe it as sadness would be to ascribe a degree of feeling that was lacking in him during that period which lasted for — who knows? — perhaps weeks, months, or maybe almost twenty-five years.”
“After all, a few crumbs of love could be made to last a long time if they are all you have.”
“A person who travels is no sooner back and settled into their old routine than they are already mooning over pictures of their next destination. They are never mentally and physically in the same place for long. When they travel they are full of daydreams about their real life back home, and when at home they project how things would be so much better if they were in Santiago or Khartoum, or even a little B&B fifty miles down the road overlooking a bay. Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don’t mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them. A traveller can’t possibly understand the world, because most of the people in the world have no choices and no options. In other words, they are poor bastards, God help them.”
“Only you can know if you’re doing this to escape what happened to your parents, but I can tell you this, as someone who wishes only good things for you: trying not to repeat someone else’s history is a wasteful way to live.”
“He had entered a selfish period of survival, [...]. They had rained love on him, willing him to open up and accept their support, but it all bounced back off the carapace that had formed around his wounded inner self. The tragedy during that time was that he neither let them in nor let them go. But what else is possible for a man unable to solve his own sadness?”
“Years of life untraced and unshared. He had told nobody about the Iron Mask or about his intention to retreat like a woodland animal and deal with it alone. But illness meant dependency. It was society’s last chance to push the benefits of membership. For every person who feared dying alone, there were others like Panenka who resisted the intimacy of it, the body’s loss of privacy and the final exhibition of the personality.”
“The criticism was justified; the punishment similarly so. They should be allowed to destroy him, and if they didn't do it, he would do it to himself.”
“I could have asked for the full tour ― you could have shown me around all your own facts and circumstances, given me the tourist board version of yourself. A whole story that I would later have to revise or unlearn based on who you turned out to be. But if I start with what you're actually like, pick you up where I found you, then at least I'm starting with my information. I can sketch you my own way, and then colour you in over time. And you could do the same with me.”
“Do you know what resonance is?
'Resonance?'
'It's as though one person sounds a bell in their heart, and if the other person has the same bell inside them, it rings too.'
'I see,' he said to her reflection.
'So,' she continued, 'that's how you can recognise something in someone, even if you know nothing about them.’”
“Aren't you afraid of failing? Letting everyone down?'
Esther thought about it.
'Maybe it's important that other people learn how to handle disappointment.’”
“Why do men find one hairstyle and then mate with it for life?”