Sunbeams

That sudden and ill-timed love affair may be compared to this: you take boys somewhere for a walk; the walk is jolly and interesting — and suddenly one of them gorges himself with oil paint.

Anton Chekhov

There is sanctuary in reading, sanctuary in formal society, in the company of old friends, and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another.

Cyril Connolly

Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy.

Søren Kierkegaard

People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.

C.S. Lewis

There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.

Francois La Rochefoucauld

A man too good for the world is no good for his wife.

Yiddish Proverb

Love matches, as they are called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Friedrich Nietzsche

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

When night comes and you too are dark
     lie down and be dark with a will.
And when morning comes and
     you are still dark
     stand up and say to the day with a will,
     “I am still dark.”
It is stupid to play a role with the night
     and the day.
They would both laugh at you.

Khalil Gibran

There is a palace that opens only to tears.

Zohar

It is not our job to remain unbroken.
Our task is to lose our lives
And be born again, as trees
Draw up from the great roots.

Robert Bly, “A Home in Dark Grass”

When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female will not be female . . . then shall you enter the Kingdom.

The Gospel According to Thomas