Somebody Said It Better

"I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more."

"I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. -How much do you love me?- And -Who’s in charge?-’ Everything else is somehow manageable."

"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."

"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more crazy about each other when you are the only extra person in the room."

"

Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted - wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought, Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. Part of you thought, please look at me.

If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back, Alma, you shouted. Come back! Come back!

But she didn’t.

And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

"

"You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it’s childish. … Coupled life and family life bring out everything that’s childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always with each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. The unnatural deference."

"You’ll always be powerless to this girl. You’ll never be in charge. There’s something there … that makes you crazy and always will. If you don’t cut the connection for good, in the end that something will destroy you. You’re no longer merely answering natural need with her. … You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl - you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment … I’m not against it because it’s digusting. I’m against it because it’s falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin."