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My hopes and dreams, so tattered and tender, had been sheltered by secrecy for so long that I could not bear to bring them to light.
What I wouldn’t have given to be the object of someone’s desire, just for one moment. What I wouldn’t have given to taste that fruit, that heady sweetness, of being wanted. I wanted. I wanted what Käthe took for granted. I wanted wantonness.
His voice was neither deep nor high, but there was a quality to it that spoke of dark woods and dry winter nights. “Perhaps I just wanted to make a young woman’s day a little bit brighter. The nights grow long and cold, after all.”
“Charm is all well and good,” she said, straining the sausages and setting them on a towel to dry. “But charm doesn’t put bread on the table. Charm goes out with his friends at night when he could be showing his son to all the great masters himself.”
I found it hard to express my love for my mother; we shared an understanding, but we did not share hugs.
After all, I was not a child of beauty; I was a child of the queer, the strange, and the wild.
“What’s the use of running, if we are on the wrong road?”
My life is like a broken bowl, A broken bowl that cannot hold One drop of water for my soul Or cordial in the searching cold; Cast in the fire the perish’d thing; Melt and remould it, till it be A royal cup for Him, my King. —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, A Better Resurrection
the days when the futility of my existence threatened to suffocate me, I always found the strength to face the next hour, the next task, the next chore. It was easier not to think of the long road ahead, lest I drown in the mire and muck of my mundane life.
I can only live, either altogether with you or not at all. — LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
