The Confessions Of Max Tivoli Quotes

We are each the love of someone's life.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.

We are each the love of someone's life --- The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window...

People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don't know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life." Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. "You think about nobody, nothing else, you don't eat or sleep, you just think about this . . . it's overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you're young and you think it's marvelous, just so elegant, and you don't know, you don't know anything . . . because, you've never tasted anything better. You're fourteen." It was no time for lying. "I think it's love" You do?" I think maybe it's the only true love." She was about to say something, and stopped herself. I'd surprised her, I suppose. "How sad if you're right," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. "Because we never end up with them. How sad and stupid if that's how it works.

As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.

Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.

We waste so much time within ourselves.

We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.

This was the human mind made real, overshadowing even the birds in its longing to be free. Are we the only animals that must escape ourselves? Because, seeing that balloon, I could imagine my own soul, trapped in the dusty acreage of my old body, burning with a flame like this and lifting away from me, just as silvered, just as new.

years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in

How do we forgive ourselves? Our parents watch us so carefully when we’re children, desperate not to miss a first scream, a first step, a first word, never taking their eyes off us. Yet we do not watch them. They near the end in solitude—even those who live beside us die in solitude—and rarely do we catch their own milestones: the last scream before the morphine settles in, last step before they cannot walk, last word before the throat seals.

The Confessions Of Max Tivoli