"There is only one time that is important. Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: And the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!"
Sayfa 55 - The HermitKitabı okudu
As I tell the story to Colborne, guilt wriggles, wormlike, in the pit of my stomach. Our relationship was a point of significant interest, but Meredith refused to testify at my trial, stubbornly insisting that she didn’t remember what everyone wanted to know. She spent a few weeks being hounded by press people, which proved to be too much attention even for her. After I was convicted she went back to the Manhattan apartment and, for a month or so, didn’t come out. (Her brother Caleb made the news before she did, when he broke a paparazzo’s jaw with his briefcase. After that, the vultures lost interest, and I thought of Caleb more fondly.)
Meredith did eventually make her way to TV—she stars now in some legal drama loosely based on the Henry VI cycle. It was popular in prison, not because of its Shakespearean source material, but because she spends a lot of time on the show lounging around in slinky nightgowns that show off her figure. She came to visit me—only once—and when the rumor that I’d had some sort of affair with her surfaced, it won me unprecedented respect among the other inmates. If pressed for details I told them only what could be found on the Internet or was obvious: that she was a natural redhead, had a small birthmark on her hip, wasn’t shy about sex. The more intimate truths I kept to myself: that our lovemaking was as sweet as it was savage; that despite her normally foul mouth the only noise she ever made in bed was to murmur “Oh God, Oliver” in my ear; that we might have even loved each other, for a minute or two.
Act 3, PrologueKitabı okudu
My body had become ageless. It took a heavily disapproving look from customers sitting next to us in a restaurant to apprise me of it, a look which far from making me ashamed, reinforced my determination not to hide my affair with a man “who could have been my son,” when any fifty-something guy could carry on openly with a woman obviously not his daughter without arousing disapproval.
''... The fact was that despite himself, without knowing why or how it had happened and very much against his better judgement, he had fallen hopelessly in love. He had fallen as if into some deep and muddy hole. By nature he was a delicate and sensitive soul. He had had ideals and dreamed of an exquisite and passionate affair... He had fallen under the omnipotent and mysterious spell of the female... There was no way he could explain its fatal and total power...''
Sayfa 17 - Penguin Classics
(…) My enemies are the source of half my income. They hate me so much that it becomes a subliminal love affair.
"The most important thing in life is not to get what you want, but to still want it after you get it."
- Love Affair