I Fed Mercy Crayons

“… We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.”

— Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence”

“The mere fact of not looking at May, seated beside his table, under his lamp, the fact of seeing other houses, roofs, chimneys, of getting the sense of other lives outside his own, other cities beyond New York, and a whole world beyond his world, cleared his brain and made it easier to breathe.

After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few minutes he heard her say: “Newland! Do shut the window. You’ll catch your death.”

He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But I’ve caught it already. I am dead—I’ve been dead for months and months.”

…

He shook his head and turned toward his arm-chair. She bent over her work-frame, and as he passed he laid his hand on her hair. “Poor May!” he said.

“Poor? Why poor?” she echoed with a strained laugh.

“Because I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you,” he rejoined, laughing also.

For a moment she was silent; then she said very low, her head bowed over her work: “I shall never worry if you’re happy.”

 “Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!”

— Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence”

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”

— Edith Wharton,“The Age of Innocence”

“You hated happiness brought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference…Newland. You couldn’t be happy if it meant being cruel. If we act any other way I’ll be making you act against what I love in you most. And I can’t go back to that way of thinking. Don’t you see? I can’t love you unless I give you up.” — Countess Olenska (Taken with instagram)

The three and the forgotten

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”

— George Eliot

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Idiot”

“Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.”

— Patrick White, “The Tree of Man”

“All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.” 
— Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

….

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul

…

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way …

— Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XVII”

“Sometimes the ‘unfinisheds’ are among the most beautiful symphonies.”

— Viktor Frankl

Tenderness and fire and the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind