but above all, the descriptive, apt, yet still simple and lovely language:
"Our interest in other people, however great, is always finite. It is only for one's own life that one has infinite curiosity, infinite patience, infinite tenderness. But this universal truth is clouded in the early days of romance, when things are new and full of wonder and we are like somnambulists, mesmerised by the wonder of another person."
"Everything we did together was as though for the first time and retained an Edenic glow. Each moment was spotlit by a constellation of twinkling endorphins. There is a kind of prospective nostalgia isn't there? While experiencing a happy time, you already regret its passing. You can't help imagining yourself far in the future wistfully recalling the present, which is gone for ever. This feeling made those early days with Julia almost painfully poignant. It was as if I alone knew we were under a sentence of death and had to protect her from this knowledge of time, of mortality."
"How much our daydreams tell us about our inner secret selves, and how stubbornly we put our hands to our ears and refuse to hear. What pain to ourselves and others could be avoided if only we would put down our hands and listen to that voice."
"Sometimes in summer the night carried the sound of the distant highway to her bedroom, the air breaks of trucks as they went down the other side of the hill telling her that by morning they'd be far away and shed still be at home. I imagined her lying in bed on those hot nights, the trembling vibrato of the trucks sounding like the plaintive howls of hungry monsters calling out to each other in the darkness of the bush."
"I felt as if I'd gone on a holiday and was never coming back. Julia was my Iberia, my India, my Paraguay. One day followed another, indistinguishable, weightless, and free from care."
"If you described the typical relationship in a graph, it would form a parabola. Coordinates: y = time, x = a kiss, a whispered 'yes', a smile in the dark. Imagine this as a diagram of the ascent, fight and descent of a plane: the excitement of taking off, the high altitude cruise (holding hands and looking down on a landscape of clouds), then the bumpy landing and the relief of the wheels touching down on the ground. But now and then it happens that a relationship stays in the firmament, twin stars orbiting each other with the intimacy of satellites."
amidst more.
picking up the quotes more for myself than anyone else, i hate it when contents of a quote comes to me but i lose the exact phrasing that holds its complete and true beauty. i could and should really do this for all the books i've read. but of course the moment it gets in my head that it is a GOOD thing to do and should become a HABIT i pretty much stop doing it. we'd see. ok la, tired enough. tata.