- 'but we found ourselves calling one another every day, sometimes as many as five times a day, not to say anything in particular, simply because both of us felt we had never spoken like this to anyone before, that all the rest had been compromised and self-deception, that only now were we finally able to understand and make ourselves understood = that the waiting was truly over. I recognized in her the woman I had clumsily been seeking all my life, a creature whose smile and whose eyes, whose sense of humor and whose taste in books, whose anxieties and whos intelligence miraculously matched those of my ideal'
- 'my mind drifted irresponsibly but irresistibly back to her. I felt the need to circle around the object of my adoration, she kept breaking into consciousness with the urgency of a matter that had to be addressed, though my thoughts had no point to them, they were (objectively speaking) utterly devoid of interest'
- 'love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the normality of the loved one. hence the boredom of lovers for those standing on the sidelines
- 'in each other's company, we spent a good deal of time discussing how awful other people were. unable to express ourselves honestly in most of our daily interactions, we could between us create our lies and atone for the social niceties we had performed. Chloe became the final repository of my harsh verdicts on friends or colleagues. things I had long thought about them but had tried to deny, I was free to share with a sympathetic and even encouraging audience. love nourished itself through perpetual criticism of outsiders. the finest proof of our loyalty towards one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else'
- 'it is easiest to accept happiness when it is brought about through things that one can control, that one has achieved after much effort and reason. but the happiness I had reached with Chloe had not come as a result of any personal achievement or effort. it was simply the outcome of having by a miracle of divine intervention, found a person whose company was more valuable to meet than that of anyone else in the world. such happiness was dangerous precisely because it was so lacking in self-sufficient permanence'
- 'preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, is it a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful and reciprocated. Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been lost'
mar 12 2021 ∞
mar 12 2021 +
mar 12 2021 +