The Ivy Tree

by Mary Stewart

It isn’t the people who’ve had things their own way who – well, who get wisdom. And they haven’t the time to think

about what life does to other people, either. But if you’ve been hurt yourself, you can imagine it. You come alive to it. It’s the only use I can ever see that pain has. All that stuff about welcoming suffering because it lifts up the soul is rot. People ought to avoid pain if they can, like disease

but if they have ...

it, its best use might be that it makes them kinder. Being kind’s the ...

It seemed that, to Julie, falling in love was an act as definable and as little controlled by the will, as catching a disease in an epidemic. That there came

a moment when the will deliberately sat back and franked the desire, was as foreign to her as the knowledge that, had the will not retreated, desire would have turned aside and life, in the end, have gone as quietly on.