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Loving someone who loves you back is perhaps the only time we feel completely safe and joyful and kinder. It’s like coming in from the rain, arriving someplace safe and warm. When love stops, it feels like being outside
Humans are unbelievably resilient creatures in the face of most of the world’s horrors. We are brave in battle, heroic in the face of disease, and really just terrific on the whole until someone breaks up with us. And then we absolutely implode.
Heartbreak has the potential to make everyone a worse version of themselves.
She went to sleep preoccupied with worry that she was going to run into her ex-husband and it was going to be so weird.
Sometimes they are necessary to help us accomplish what we need to do and to transform us into who we need to be.
As great as happiness is, knowing loss often helps us connect with and comfort others.
The point is, though, that she not only poisoned her husband but poisoned him twice.
it was a time when everyone who did anything deserved to die.
So I don’t know why history teachers try to make ancient Rome sound civilized. If the city-state had a motto, it would be ABSOLUTELY NO ONE HERE DIES OF NATURAL CAUSES.
You do not spit into the wind, you do not kid a kidder, and you do not poison Agrippina.
That seemed more promising than stealthily constructing a collapsible bedroom.
So even if you have no moral compass, I suppose the lesson is don’t kill people because you might have night terrors.
Or I’d like to say that Sporus led a contented, solitary life somewhere in the country, reading lots of books and cultivating meaningful relationships with pets.
There are times when we feel we are trapped in a relationship with someone who is clearly terrible for us.
But we can leave! We
are all blessed with the ability to walk out of bad relationships. We are not Sporus. Thank God, we’re not Sporus. And no matter how badly you might...
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I had become the person I wanted to be at fourteen, I would be a vampire with veterinary skills.)
Other times, extraordinary personalities get together, and then they destroy each other. This is what happens here.
Rosamund was the kind of gentle, obliging woman that men love, whereas Eleanor was obviously terrifying, what with her elaborate parties and all of those pan flutes.
“My main turn-on is definitely incompetence.”
That’s actually a colossal arrow pointing to her—an arrow made out of foliage. In
“Don’t you know that it is our nature to quarrel, our heritage that none of us should love the other?”
Sometimes, we allow our partners to see us clearly only after we’re no longer with them. Given the constraints of a relationship—the desire to appear nice or sexy or cool or organized or intellectual or whatever we think the other party views a good partner as—we don’t show them how bold and fearless and powerful and strange we can be.
There was absolutely no ambiguity about who was in charge because Eleanor signed all her letters “Eleanor, by the Grace of God, Queen of the English, Duchess of the Normans.” And, until she died at eighty-one, she lived, as much as a person can, happily ever after.
“No one died! And I bet that silk tunic was beautiful! That’s cool! It’s nice that lots of people got prizes!” The sex stories about
Just popes having naked chestnut parties with the kids borne by one of their many mistresses’ teenage daughters.
Lucrezia is nip slipping you while holding up some flowers, and it’s amazing this picture isn’t the cover of a cool person’s music album yet.
Maybe we all can be bolder and crazier and decide to act as though other people will just follow our
The exes we feel a need to hide from are the ones who make us feel embarrassed about our treatment of them. If you sign your ex up for a sex addict’s meeting
If you’re a decent person, you will know that you did something scummy, even if it was nicer than what everyone else around you was doing, and you will never be able to face your ex at a party again. You’ll
Even today we can understand that avoiding talking terribly about a not-so-great ex is taking a higher road than shouting insults about how you wish you’d never met that person. And when an ex was obviously terrible, as everyone knew Henry was, it just makes you look really composed and forgiving and great.
The premium we place on being “real” may be a youthful luxury that we indulge in before we start thinking about our legacies.
“Your breakup will not define your life. In the story of you, this will not be the central narrative.” However, Henry VIII beheaded not one but two wives.
Anyone who complains about people spending too much time watching reality shows and playing video games does not know what people with spare time got up to in a world without mindless amusements to keep them occupied. They made giants
Think of the times following a breakup when you audibly groaned when you saw a couple making out on a street corner. No? You are more reserved? Well, I like to groan and fake retch and throw garbage at them because I’m a garbage queen, so I guess Miss Havisham and I can have our own party. Sometimes
No one speaks lovingly of Anna Ivanovna, and no one wants to date that guy who keeps making jokes about how his ex-wife screwed him. A quote often attributed to Buddha says, “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” And they will not die. Not even if you imprison them in an ice palace torture chamber. They
And because when the stories are told, the people like Anna Ivanovna who align themselves against love always come out looking terrible.
If he was unhappy, it seems it would have been easier to divorce than to pretend your wife does not exist, especially when she was still living in your home and throwing things at you.
The person you’ve decided is a ghost doesn’t feel a sense of closure, but neither do you, so you sort of assume that resuming the relationship is always an option.
Lady Jane’s heart was made of live cobra, and she later went on to serve as inspiration for the fictional supervillain the Joker and all the unsympathetic characters in the film Mean Girls (2004). (There’s nothing to back this claim, but it feels right in my heart, which is made of love.)
Oscar Wilde writes in The Picture of Dorian Gray that “the tears of those we no longer love always seem faintly ridiculous,”
Indeed, some historians admire Caroline for feeling all her feelings.
Drama isn’t really as pleasurable as having someone who will sit and support you and love you—which William seemed perfectly willing to do. It seems a shame that Caroline missed out on that. While Caroline may not have
Sometimes stupid triumphs over clever and kind and sparkling. I take no pleasure in writing the story
“To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.”
Supposedly, on their wedding night, she expected him to perform some manner of concert for her, which may be the only known example where this phrase is not a euphemism.
The length of time two people are together isn’t the way to gauge the pain of the ending. Feelings don’t work that way. After a few times when
members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”
but if it cannot last, hopefully we can at least appreciate it while it is
In the end, it’s probably only the inevitability of loss and the way we reconcile ourselves to it that unite everyone. So even if the average person can’t sympathize with Edith Wharton’s rarefied world, her novels endure because she was able to sympathize with us.
