How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
Sayfa 159
Such is my journal of what relates to this strange occurrence up to the present day. The stranger has gradually improved in health but is very silent and appears uneasy when anyone except myself enters his cabin. Yet his manners are so conciliating and gentle that the sailors are all interested in him, although they have had very little communication with him. For my own part, I begin to love him as a brother, and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable. I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart.
Sayfa 15
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is
a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people
involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different
countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain
"All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself."
On the Preachers of DeathKitabı okuyor
"And you too, for whom life is hectic work and unrest: are you not very weary of life? Are you not very ripe for the sermon of death?
All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.
If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting – not even for laziness!
Everywhere sounds the voice of those who preach death: and the earth is full of people to whom departure from life must be preached."
On the Preachers of DeathKitabı okuyor
“No,” I said. “Seems like just yesterday my dad was shouting at me for throwing my life away.”
Alexander snorted. “What was it he said to you?”
“‘You’re going to turn down a scholarship at Case Western and spend the next four years in makeup and panty hose, making love to some girl through a window?’”
“Art school” alone was enough to provoke my rigidly practical father, but more often than not Dellecher’s dangerous exclusivity was the cause of raised eyebrows. Why should intelligent, talented students risk forcible ejection from their school at the end of each year and graduate without even a traditional degree to show for their survival? What most people who lived outside the strange sphere of conservatory education didn’t realize was that a Dellecher certificate was like one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—guaranteed to grant the bearer admission to the elite artistic and philological sodalities that survived outside of academia.
Scene 4Kitabı okudu
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication:
Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk
The hopes of all men, and of every nation;
Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk
Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion!
"How strange a chequer work of providence is the life of a man! And by what secret differing springs are the affections hurry'd about as differing circumstances present! To day we love what to morrow we hate; to day we seek what to morrow we shun; to day we desire what to morrow we fear, nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of;"
Sayfa 164Kitabı okudu
One night, Wafeya asked me: 'Have you ever fallen in love
Firdaus?'.
No, Wafeya. I have never been in love,' I replied.
She stared at me with surprise and said, How strange!
Why do you find it strange? I asked.
'There is something about your looks that suggests you are
in love.'
But what is it in a person's looks that can hint at love?
She shook her head and said, 'I do not know. But I feel that
you, in particular, are a person who cannot live without love.'
"Yet I am living without love."
'Then you are either living a lie, or not living living at all.'
Hundreds of years later, historians and scholars would look back upon this moment. This decision that, one day, would topple an empire.
What a strange choice, they would whisper. Why would he do this?
Why, indeed.
After all, vampires know better than anyone how important it is to protect their hearts.
And love, understand, is sharper than any stake.
