Quotes
You're at that game of threatening me with the loss of your affection again, are you? I think it couldn't have been very genuine stuff to begin with, if it's so easily demolished.
He despises me, because he knows I love him.
In love affairs, there is no mediator like a merry, simple-hearted child — ever ready to cement divided hearts, to span the unfriendly gulf of custom, to melt the ice of cold reserve, and overthrow the separating walls of dread formality and pride.
It’s well to have such a comfortable assurance regarding the worth of those we love. I only wish you may not find your confidence misplaced.
A girl's affections should never be won unsought.
If I hate the sins, I love the sinner, and would do much for his salvation.
Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it’s only faith that gives love its strength and its joy.
p. 221
Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened. - Karla
It’s a fact of life on run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true. - Lin
What characterizes the human race more,’ Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?’ I thought the question was acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.
Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways; it's pushy, it has no real sense of humor and it turns up where you least expect it.
For what is love if not the promise to forgive? - Lin
