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In my youth and comparative inexperience, I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one’s will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another’s passion. Of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look on impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength, to pluck her from the flames. He who is himself
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For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman.
for not to return a woman’s love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty.
It is in vain that you try not to think of her who thinks always of you,
She carries you always within her, carries you about with her, no matter whither you may flee.
I was running away because I could not bear to be loved against my will.
for one can run away from anything except oneself.
It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.
Only those with whom life had dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love.
I have realized afresh that no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
