unrequited love (under construction)
"And I must set it down to-day so that I shall have it for ever, intact and lovely, untouched by the sadness that is coming - for of course it is coming; my brain tells me that."
"All I can recall is happiness, happiness in my mind and in my heart and flowing through my whole body, happiness like the warm cloak of sunlight that fell round me on the tower."
"all during the drive home I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation; it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray."
"that he belonged to Rose, that I could never win him from her even if I were wicked enough to try, which I never would be."
"Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth."
"how bitter it is to read that last line I wrote little over three weeks ago - now when I cannot even remember what happiness feels like!" ... "the dead, flat, watching-myself feeling which has come this morning for the first time. It is utterly dreary but better than acute wretchedness."
"a game of follow-the-leader we are all playing"
"it wasn't only the wonderful luxury of being in love that had been buoying me up: deep down, in some vague mixed way, I had been letting myself hope that he didn't really care for her, that it was me he loved and that kissing me would have made him realise it."
"Wakings are the worst times - almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll onto my heart."
"I don't think I could bring myself to describe any of them in detail because, though they are wonderful at the time, they give me a flat, sick, ashamed feeling to look back on. And they are like a drug, one needs them oftener and oftener and has to make them more and more exciting - until at last one's imagination won't work at all."
"surely one wants to write about the person one is in love with? Why, I even write Simon's name on scraps of paper! (And then get fits of nerves that I haven't really torn them up.)"
"It was the funny little girl he had liked - the comic child playing at Midsummer rites; she was the one he had kissed."
"And yet as my eyes turned to Stephen facing the sunrise, from Simon in the darkness of my mind, it was as if Simon's had been the living face and Stephen's the one I was imagining - or a photograph, a painting, something beautiful but not really alive for me. My whole heart was so full of Simon that even my pity for Stephen wasn't quite real - it was only something I felt I ought to feel, more from my head than from my heart. And I knew I ought to pity him all the more because I could pity him so little."
"Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can."
"Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you' - like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper."
"A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?
There was mist on Midsummer Eve, mist when we drove into the dawn.
He said he would come back.
Only the margin to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you."
"We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?
'Biddy,' said I, when we were walking homeward, 'I wish you could put me right.'
'I wish I could!' said Biddy.
'If I could only get myself to fall in love with you, - you don't mind me speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?'
'Oh dear, not at all!' said Biddy. 'Don't mind me.'
'If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.'
'But you never will, you see,' said Biddy."
"There appeared upon the scene - say at the races, or the public balls, or anywhere else you like - a certain man, who made love to Miss Havisham. I never saw him, but I have heard my father mention that he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner." ... "This man pursued Miss Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no doubt that she perfectly idolised him. He practised on her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all." ... "she was too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any one" ... "he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and was placing herself too unreservedly in his power"
"The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter -" ... "At the hour and minute at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks." ... "she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day"
"'Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?'
'Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.'
She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. 'Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?'
Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all) she repeated, 'Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces, - and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper, - love her, love her, love her!'
Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her.
'Here me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!'
She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love - despair - revenge - dire death - it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse.
'I'll tell you,' said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, 'what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!'
When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself against the wall and fallen dead."
"Far into the night, Miss Havisham's words, 'Love her, love her, love her!' sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, 'I love her, I love her, I love her!' hundreds of times."
"Ah me! I thought these were high and great emotions."
"its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very serious. Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. Think of what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may lead to miserable things."
"My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until the day arrived."
"While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her." ... "I beat the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me. What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?"
"Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)"
"Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon us, and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be, I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it always was."
"she held my heart in her hand because she wilfully chose to do it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her to crush it and throw it away."
"And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable."
"O the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that house."
"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."
"'Pip, Pip,' she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond; 'will you never take warning?'
'Of what?'
'Of me.'
'Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?'
'Do I mean! If you don't know what I mean, you are blind.'"
"But when we sat by her flickering fire at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her, by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated; and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a very sceptre."
"that Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on men, and that she was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the prize was reserved for me. In a word, I saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes, and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden from the sun."
"'I begin to think,' said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment of calm wonder, 'that I almost understand how this comes about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she had never once seen your face, - if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?'
Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.
'Or,' said Estella, '- which is a nearer case, - if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her; - if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?'
Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her face), but still made no answer.
'So,' said Estella, 'I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.'"
"'Do you want me, then,' said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and serious, if not angry, look, 'to deceive and entrap you?'
'Do you deceive and trap him, Estella?'
'Yes, and many others, - all of them but you.'"
"a model with a mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at hand"
"'Sally, she really is upstairs alonger me, now, and I can't get rid of her. She's all in white,' he says, 'wi' white flowers in her hair, and she's awful mad, and she's got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says she'll put it on me at five in the morning.'" ... "'I don't know how she's there,' says Arthur, shivering dreadful with the horrors, 'but she's standing in the corner at the foot of the bed, awful mad. And over where her heart's broke - you broke it! - there's drops of blood.'" ... "'Why look at her!' he cries out. 'She's a shaking the shroud at me! Don't you see her? Look at her eyes! Ain't it awful to see her so mad?' Next he cries, 'She'll put it on me, and then I'm done for! Take it away from her, take it away!' And then he catched hold of us, and kep on a talking to her, and answering of her, till I half believed I see her myself." ... "'Here she is! She's got the shroud again. She's unfolding it. She's coming out of the corner. She's coming to the bed. Hold me, both on you - one of each side - don't let her touch me with it. Hah! she missed me that time. Don't let her throw it over my shoulders. Don't let her lift me up to get it round me. She's lifting me up. Keep me down!' Then he lifted himself up hard, and was dead."
"'Who am I,' cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in surprise, - 'who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?'"
"'It seems,' said Estella, very calmly, 'that there are sentiments, fancies - I don't know how to call them, - which I am not able to comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all. I have tried to warn you of this; now, have I not?'"
"'Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since -- on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!'
In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I don't know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out."
"while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse."
"Why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the winds, how do I know? Why did you who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own last year, last month, last week?"
"'O!" she cried, despairingly. 'What have I done! What have I done!'
'If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances. - Is she married?'
It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house had told me so.
'What have I done! What have I done!' She wrung her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. 'What have I done!'
I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
'Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!' And so again, twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!"
"And if he asked me why I wanted it, and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell him, little as he cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved Estella dearly and long, and that although I had lost her, and must live a bereaved life, whatever concerned her was still nearer and dearer to me than anything else in the world."
"I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her."
"Stumbling down the wooden steps and out into the darkness, grinding the pebbles fiercely under his heels, he felt all the forces of the plausible, the predictable and the ordinary envelop him like ropes. Nothing was going to happen; and the hell with her. Why wasn't she at home where she belonged? Why couldn't she go to Europe or disappear or die? The hell with this aching, suffering, callow, half-assed delusion that he was in 'love' with her. The hell with 'love' anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assd emotion in the world."
"She didn't really want to talk; not to him, anyway. All she wanted was to sound off, to make herself feel better by playing at being wistful and jaded, and she had elected him as her audience."
"'It's not that. Honestly. It's just that I don't know who you are.'
There was a silence. 'Don't talk riddles,' he whispered.
'I'm not. I really don't know who you are.'
If he couldn't see her face, at least he could touch it. He did so with a blind man's delicacy, drawing his fingertips from her temple down into the hollow of her cheek.
'And even if I did,' she said, 'I'm afraid it wouldn't help, because you see I don't know who I am, either.'"
Ay me! sad hours seem long.
Was that my father that went hence so fast?
It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
Out of her favour, where I am in love.
Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!
Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still,
Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!
Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.
Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,
sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?
At thy good heart's oppression.
Why, such is love's transgression.
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
With more of thine: this love that thou hast shown
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
Farewell, my coz.
Soft! I will go along;
An if you leave me so, you do me wrong.
Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here;
This is not Romeo, he's some other where.
Tell me in sadness, who is that you love.
What, shall I groan and tell thee?
Groan! why, no.
But sadly tell me who.
Bid a sick man in sadness make his will:
Ah, word ill urged to one that is so ill!
In sadness, cousin, I do love a woman.
I aim'd so near, when I supposed you loved.
A right good mark-man! And she's fair I love.
A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit.
Well, in that hit you miss: she'll not be hit
With Cupid's arrow; she hath Dian's wit;
And, in strong proof of chastity well arm'd,
From love's weak childish bow she lives unharm'd.
She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold:
O, she is rich in beauty, only poor,
That when she dies with beauty dies her store.
Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?
She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste,
For beauty starved with her severity
Cuts beauty off from all posterity.
She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair,
To merit bliss by making me despair:
She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow
Do I live dead that live to tell it now.
Be ruled by me, forget to think of her.
O, teach me how I should forget to think.
By giving liberty unto thine eyes;
Examine other beauties.
'Tis the way
To call hers exquisite, in question more:
These happy masks that kiss fair ladies' brows
Being black put us in mind they hide the fair;
He that is strucken blind cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost:
Show me a mistress that is passing fair,
What doth her beauty serve, but as a note
Where I may read who pass'd that passing fair?
Farewell: thou canst not teach me to forget.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM:
I love thee not, therefore pursue me not.
Where is Lysander and fair Hermia?
The one I'll slay, the other slayeth me.
Thou told'st me they were stolen unto this wood;
And here am I, and wode within this wood,
Because I cannot meet my Hermia.
Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more.
You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant;
But yet you draw not iron, for my heart
Is true as steel: leave you your power to draw,
And I shall have no power to follow you.
Do I entice you? do I speak you fair?
Or, rather, do I not in plainest truth
Tell you, I do not, nor I cannot love you?
And even for that do I love you the more.
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love,--
And yet a place of high respect with me,--
Than to be used as you use your dog?
Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit;
For I am sick when I do look on thee.
And I am sick when I look not on you.
You do impeach your modesty too much,
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not;
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity.
Your virtue is my privilege: for that
It is not night when I do see your face,
Therefore I think I am not in the night;
Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company,
For you in my respect are all the world:
Then how can it be said I am alone,
When all the world is here to look on me?
I'll run from thee and hide me in the brakes,
And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.
The wildest hath not such a heart as you.
Run when you will, the story shall be changed:
Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase;
The dove pursues the griffin; the mild hind
Makes speed to catch the tiger; bootless speed,
When cowardice pursues and valour flies.
I will not stay thy questions; let me go:
Or, if thou follow me, do not believe
But I shall do thee mischief in the wood.
Ay, in the temple, in the town, the field,
You do me mischief. Fie, Demetrius!
Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex:
We cannot fight for love, as men may do;
We should be wood and were not made to woo.
I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell,
To die upon the hand I love so well.