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.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.

Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is.

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

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.

Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.

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.