As I go off into the big black abyss of my future, I have to admit that I am terrified and also a bit insecure in my decisions. But, I also realize that anyone who has ever gone off into uncharted waters must have felt similar to the way I feel now, which gives me a small ounce of comfort. I don’t know how to do what I am doing, I have no way of knowing if this is the right way or not. But I guess I’ll never know until I get there. So, this is me, being a pioneer.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

I want to kiss you.” Jace’s whisper pulled me from my thoughts and I glanced up to find his eyes blazing with raw need. “Just because Marc won’t touch you doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. Right? I don’t have that kind of self-control, and honestly, I don’t see the point in it. Are you supposed to be impressed by how long we can go without touching you? ’Cause if that’s the game we’re playing, I think I’d rather lose.

Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853)

I run to the high mountainsI pour my heart out to the skiesI sing of the summer songWhile the sky above dance in the yellow light.The cool breeze fools the sun aboveTakes a run, wins the mighty fight.Your light then comes to me with warmth,A view my heart wants.Love to me is the song you write.The tricks you play with the endless skyAnd with the icy wind you find a disguise.You burn me like sun that burns up In the blue abyss.With the ink of my emotionsYou write a song of Fire and Ice.

God loves his creatures, and he loves each one the more, the more it shares his own goodness, which is the first and primary object of his love. Therefore he wants the desires of his rational creatures to be fulfilled because they share most perfectly of all creatures the goodness of god.And his will is an accomplisher of things because he is the cause of things by his will. So it belongs to the divine goodness to fulfill the desires of rational creatures which are put to him in prayer.

Believe me, young lady, when I tell you that there is no place for you in his world of ghosts and nightmares — no place for your fresh beauty or your unmarred dreams, no place for your wonderful hope. He can bring you nothing, because he has lost everything. Don’t try to keep him, to tie him down, because if you succeed, if he weakens, he will hate you for it. Let him be. He is not unhappy; he is resigned. He has surrendered and acquired at a high cost a deep understanding of life.

Every motion she made was slow, as if she’d never before put her arms around a man, and didn’t know for certain where everything fit. When at last they were pressed close, she didn’t think she’d know how to let go when the time came. They summarized the course of passion with kisses: a chaste, half-frightened brush of the lips metamorphosed into something fierce and fast-burning, which in its turn became a more patient, more intimate touch, full of inquiry and shared pleasure.

I always thought that falling in love should feel like jumping from a cliff. A fall that scares you as much as it excites you, that leaves you breathless and wanting more. The impossible kind … that ruins you for everyone else. This wasn’t it, and my chances of finding it have just become harder. I am not the same girl that I was before. Finding that special guy prepared to carry my load with me, would be one in a million, a fairytale come true, and just maybe, an impossible dream…

... self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!"That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun.

I don’t know. I don’t know, Jess,” he said as a sob shuddered through him. “Because I am a damned fool. Fuck! Ihave everything I want right in front of me, I love you so damned much I can’t think straight, and then it’s like…I don’tknow, like I’m so afraid of losing you, that I keep pushing you away so maybe I’ll stop caring as much and then it won’t hurt as bad if I do lose you. It’s so fucking twisted even I don’t understand it.

It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Take life with enthusiasm, walk humbly with passion, you have come a long way, Don't give up now... embrace your past, live for now, and tomorrow will shine brightly. Love in action every day. Do something kind for you. Do something kind for others. Do something kind for the world. Recognize you’re awesome for doing it, even if in just one small step.Let yourself have that relationship that suffocates you with an abundance of love in the steps you make! May b l e s s i n g s come upon you and through y o u .

One day, an unusually exciting event interrupted the rhythm of our regular middle-class teenage lives. A Russian woman, the mother of a girl in our class, was run over by a New York City bound train right in the center of town. Our classmate left school in the middle of the semester. The gossip was that the woman must have thrown herself under the train. The adults whispered about reasons, usual ones, but my friends and I were too busy planning what to wear to the prom to wonder about the savagery of adult passion.