November 18, 2008

Page 98


"You are wrong to think you cannot live without love, Edith."

"No, I am not wrong," she said, slowly.  "I cannot live without it.  Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature.  I mean something far more serious than that.  I mean that I cannot live well without it.  I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love.  I feel excluded from the living world.  I become cold, fish-like, immobile.  I implode.  My idea of absolute happiness is to sit ina  hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening.  Every evening."

- Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner

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