Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

I’ve remained a virgin for you.

And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.