Ralph de Bricassart

No one else can ever feel your pain.

I could never forget you, Meggie, not as long as I live. And for my punishment I’m going to live a long, long time.

I wonder why you tug so at my nonexistent heart?

Knowing the wrongs couldn’t alter them.

I might burn in Hell alongside you, but I know the Hell they’ve got planned for you: to see my indifference to you persist as we rot away together through all eternity….

“Why don’t you like her?" he said.
“Because you do,” she answered.

What difference would it have made to know his son was his son?
Was it possible to love the boy more than he had?
Would he have pursued a different path if he had known about his son?
Yes! cried his heart.
No, sneered his brain.

“There is nothing which has no right to be born, even an idea.”
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Not everything born is good, Meggie.”
“No. But if it was born at all, it was meant to be.”

She liked matching her wits against a brain as intelligent as her own, she liked outguessing him because she was never sure she actually did outguess him.

Before, his loneliness had been an impersonal thing, he had never been able to say to himself that the presence in his life of any one being could remedy it. But now loneliness had a name: Meggie. Meggie, Meggie, Meggie…

Meggie is the mirror in which I’m forced to view my mortality.

"Without faith, there is nothing.”
“A very ephemeral tenet.”

Ah, but I gave you a good fight, my Meggie! Yet in the end it isn’t your fragments I must glue together, but the dismembered chunks of myself.

“It was a good party, Mary,” he said.
“My last.”
“Don’t say that, my dear.”
“Why not? I’m tired of living, Ralph, and I’m going to stop.”Her hard eyes mocked.“Do you doubt me? For over seventy years I’ve done precisely what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, so if Death thinks he’s the one to choose the time of my going, he’s very much mistaken. I’ll die when I choose the time, and no suicide, either. It’s our will to live keeps us kicking, Ralph; it isn’t hard to stop if we really want to. I’m tired, and I want to stop. Very simple.”

I had prayed you would do better than I, for you were so young. No end is worth any means. But I suppose the seeds of our ruin are sown before our births.

Perhaps that’s what Hell is, a long term in earth-bound bondage. Perhaps we suffer our hells in living….