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Another book one of my favourite holiday movies is based on 🤗

It's interesting that the narration of French authors of this period is quite similar, if not identical. I would have bet I am reading Marquis de Sade.

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

It's like The Postman Always Rings Twice experience all over again! Quite enjoyable!

Chapter 63

“Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.”

Chapter 54

Oh, this was what happened when you broke off all ties with your family! It wasn't right; with your family, if with no one else, you have to keep on trying.

I’m worried if I come too close, they’ll say I’m overstepping. They’ll say I’m pushy, or … emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think I don’t care. I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day. There’s this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue….

You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also—if this isn't too grand a word—our tragedy.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration.

Remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose cheif characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age:when we are young we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

There were some women who aren't at all misterious, but are only made so by men's inability to understand them.

Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others.

He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too – it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us.