I do beg you to have some regard for my pride. A million years? I assure you I would stop asking after the first thousand.

He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a place to be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again to leave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears. Very much on the verge of tears. And very frightened.

I have read somewhere that we often spend a lifetime searching for what we already have.

Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo. It just simply was.

Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks. Life itself had become a secret affair.

Why do I want to run from happiness?

And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn," he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. "And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.