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How absurd they were, the games we played in the name of friendship; did empty, artificial jockeying of this sort bear any relation whatsoever to the real thing?
Can there be any sweeter intoxication than exerting power and authority over one of your own kind?
To me, you are the most precious person in the world…But even so, you want to see me the same way you see everyone else — as a nobody — and abandon me?”
People somehow manage to accustom themselves to what they first think insufferable. I, too, shall endure…
No matter what I had bottled up inside me, I was absurdly anxious about letting it out,
I only ever presented my most trivial efforts: if my works expressed anything personal, or exposed any personal particularity, I went to extreme lengths to hide them away, lest they ever see the light of day. If someone ever happened to find one, I would gasp like a naked woman caught in an intimate moment and rush away blushing.
had yet to learn that nothing in this world can ever match the marvels that we conjure up in our own minds.
All the same, I didn’t resist. I had, after all, never learned how.
But wasn’t it always like this? Some things we never know we need until we find them.
But can we call this life? To take a living plant from its natural environment and keep it in such awful confinement, just so a few enthusiasts can enjoy them — isn’t that a kind of torture?”
To pity another is to assume superiority, and that is why we must never think we are superior to others, or that others are more unfortunate…Shall we go?”
There is no woman as pitiful and ridiculous as a man swept away by his passions.
All that mattered was that two people had found each other and achieved a rare happiness. The rest was incidental. It had no choice but to fall into place, giving way to that great felicity. But I knew in my heart that this was not how events would unfold.
The pain of losing something precious — whether earthly happiness or material wealth — can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache.
