Colin McCullough

Did all men do that, love some inanimate thing more than they could love a woman? No, surely not all men. The difficult ones, perhaps, the complex ones with their seas of doubts and objections, rationalities. But there had to be simpler men, men who could surely love a woman before all else.

Too, it was a kind of ironic perversity that someone so wonderfully endowed with beauty should deem it a crippling handicap, and deplore its existence.

The Greeks say it’s a sin against the gods to love something beyond all reason. And do you remember that they say when someone is loved so, the Gods become jealous, and strike the object down in the very fullness of its flower? There’s a lesson in it, Meggie. It’s profane to love too much.

She was beautiful, and he enjoyed beauty; and, least acknowledged of all, she filled an empty space in his life which his God could not, for she had warmth and a human solidity.

It must be the demon of destructiveness in us, the impulse to poke the guts out of a fire. It only hastens the end. But what a beautiful end!

Not in the way you think. I knew you loved me, and I could wait. I’ve always believed a patient man must win in the end.

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

Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed.

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.

That’s the purpose of old age. To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

What bliss it would be if just once in his life he could show his feelings! But habit, training and discretion were too ingrained.

She wanted to roll it round on her tongue, get the bouquet of it into her lungs, spin it dizzying to her brain.

It’s never possible to go back to a way of life that’s gone.

Maybe senility’s a mercy shown to those who couldn’t face retrospection.