Paz Marquez Benitez Quotes

So all these years—since when?—he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.

Love—he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.

I should like to see your home town." "There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes." That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him. "Nothing? There is you." "Oh, me? But I am here." "I will not go, of course, until you are there." "We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees." "Could I find that?" "If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly. "I'll inquire about--" "What?" "The house of the prettiest girl in the town." "There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere." "It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically. "I thought you, at least, would not say such things." "Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--" "Are you withdrawing the compliment?" "Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--" "If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily. "Exactly." "It must be ugly." "Always?