The notion of lovers living together is altogether too demanding. One can be caught so unready.

She wasn’t at peace the way that artist painted her. She was leaning forward, and the rigidness of her spine showed the ache in her soul. She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just liker her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing...

Poor fool, ruining his life for a piece of cloth smeared with mineral paste, for a fake, I had to tell myself, a mere curiosity.

If, indeed, that was love, it wasn’t enough.

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.

You know, bicycling isn’t just a matter of balance,” I said. “it’s a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I’m going to call that the Bicyclist’s Philosophy of Life.

A year passes like a revolving wheel, and when the spoke of January comes round again, it finds itself in a different place. And so with pain. It does not leave us where it found us.

This girl, when she became a woman, would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.

Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment’s reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him... Another wish that never would come true, she saw then, even if she lived forever, was that he, that someone, would look at her not as an artistic study, but with love.

Therefore, what I had been taught to fear I now embraced. Betrayal- his or mine, it didn’t matter- freed me.