Chandra Kamil’s Reviews > Advice to a Young Wife From an Old Mistress As Told to Michael Drury > Status Update

The more conscious they become of what “ought” to be the case, the farther they are removed from the spinraneity, skill, surprise, and delight they desire, and the whole thing compounds itself.

I, who broke hearts including at time my own, am horified by cool-eyed young women scientifically certain that a heart cannot possibly break. ... Have women no instincts any more, no mystery or mettle? Must everything ve subjected to instruction and manuals, as if love were a kind of cooking school?

Words are not merely dead things, and especially names are not; they partly create the substance they denominate. Words are alive; they move, they bend, evoke, bear witness to the inner state of him who speaks.

The longing not to be nothing is one of the sharpest hungers man can know.

One thing I learned was that human beings make decisions as wisely as they can, and then make them right or wrong by the terms on which they live with those decisions.

We sought each other long before we met ... We found ourselves so mutually taken with one another, so acquianted and so endeared betwixt ourselves, that from thence forward nothing was ever so near to us as one another... Being begun so late, there was no time to lose.

Almost, but not quite, for I do not believe people are that helpless.

... almost written...

Be careful of what you want; it has a way of turning up when and where one least expects it. Be sure you are strong enough to live with it when it happens.

... love is a kind of glorious grief, equidistant from happiness and tears.