I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.
We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say.
In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.
In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.
*Prostitution* is a euphemism for rape incidents that the victim and the economy profits from.
Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn't easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens - I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself.
In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.
Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.
Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.
The pleasure or the benefit that the object of our deed derives from it is every now and then greater or even more important than the one we derive from the deed.
It is humanly impossible to be selfless. As a matter of fact, human beings are inherently selfish.