Sweet Daisy

“If we are not sad when we part, we must have done something lovely.”

“He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone.”

“But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.”

“Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

“‘I was afraid to hope it,’ he murmured, 'for from the moment I first saw you, I knew why music meant so much to me. It was sort of a substitute–a glorious substitute, for something finer–for something–something’–he looked at her–'like you.’”

“We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it—I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”

“She was a girl to whom something was going to happen.”

“Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

“Living is not this tawdry, mediocre, disciplined thing which we call our existence. Living is something entirely different; it is abundantly rich, timelessly changing, and as long as we don’t understand that eternal movement, our lives are bound to have very little meaning.”