We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There’s no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy–there’s nothing we can do.
It takes only one word to hurt a woman, a matter of seconds, one stupid, impatient blow of the crop. But winning back her trust takes years. And sometimes there isn’t the time.
Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.
She’ll be your dance partner, Jordan””Her? She’s much too good. I’m scared!””Remember the feeling. Someday you’ll want to write about it, and then it’ll be good to know how the fear feels and to go ahead and dance all the same.
Any man who loves a woman as she deserves to be loved is a magician.
Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.
[Women] are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. I learned that from your mother, and she’s right. Sad to say, she’s right.
There are women who only look at another woman’s shoes and never at her face.And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes.
Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.
I don’t know how many years it’s been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I’ll gobble you up if you’re nice to me. Or kill you because I can’t bear it.
What a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn’t have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way.
We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. …Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation.
Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.
I’m looking for what I was capable of before… Or to be more precise, I’m trying to see whether I’m still capable of it.
And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, from from it; no one should make that mistake!
And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it…There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now.
It’s amazing how close you are to your essential self as a kid, he thought, and how far from it you drift the more you strive to be loved.
Time. It rubs the rough edges that hurt us smooth.
Hey, Salvo,” asked Max when they had almost fallen asleep. “May I write your story?””Don’t you dare, amico” was Salvatore’s reply. “Kindly come up with your own storia, young Massimo. If you take mine, I’ll have none left of my own
All right,” she said. “Give me the books that are kind to me, and to hell with the men who don’t give a damn about me.
A surprise visit? That’s so romantic…but fairly risky.” “If you don’t take any risks, life will bass you by,” Cunco shipped in.
One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one’s life, don’t you think?