He leaned upon her as if there was no other support anywhere in the world, and she held him as if she would undertake no other task for all eternity.

He looked down at his empty glass. "One of the other ways in which I am different from my father," he said. "I am not interested in marrying where I do not love." I spoke in a jesting voice. "And of all the women in the eight provinces, you have not been able to find one you could love?" Now he looked at me again, and his face was completely serious. "That's the problem," he said. "There is one.

A truth that no one knows is still the truth.

I was Amazement--I was Desire--I was Ecstasy and Rapture and the slightest bit of Greed.

He leaned upon her as if there was no other support anywhere in the world, and she held him as if she would undertake no other task for all eternity.

I've remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they're actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It's the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

Sometimes we become what we see. Sometimes we take what we see and make it the model for what we refuse to become.