But Dick had come away for his soul's sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year.
But Dick had come away for his soul's sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year.
It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.
When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.
Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night
Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?
Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe's pitch - he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.
You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas - that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.
The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.
Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect-you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.
The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.
He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.
Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.
The war spirit's getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I'm going to bomb out this trench.
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.
Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...
Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.
Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.
His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard a little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.
She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.
There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.
She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.
She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it.
They were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others.
I'm not much like myself any more.
She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care - yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.
In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.
Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to in this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than anyone except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years.
Actually that's my secret - I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories