She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.' 'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.

At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person.

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.

Now let's try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn't exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England,but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.

I've noticed that the magic getting along with someone isn't really magic. If you break it down, you can see how it happens. You say something a bit off-center and see if they react. If they get it, they push it a bit further. Then it's your turn again. And theirs. And so on, until it's banter. Once it's banter, it's friendship.