ember x

“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In China we believe "rob the rich to feed the poor." But robbers here have no poetry.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“You're not worried about anything, are you?" said Danglers. "It seems to me everything's going perfectly for you."
"That's exactly what worries me," replied Dantes. "I don't think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Love', this English word: like other English words it has tense. 'Loved' or 'will love' or 'have loved'. All these tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers