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“What do you hate most?” he asks.
“A lie. And you?”
“Ownership,” he says. “When you leave me, forget me.”(152)
He knows the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
She sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder. This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband’s, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this.(156)
She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sit with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.(157)
Everything is gathered by him as part of an altering harmony. He sees her in differing hours and locations that alter her voice or nature, even her beauty, the way the background power of the sea cradles or governs the fate of lifeboats.(219)
Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evening about his age, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was, after all, a mortal age.(225)
It was a mutual affection. If Kip had been asked whom he loved most he would have named his ayah before his mother. Her comforting love greater than any blood love or sexual love for him. All through his life, he would realize later, he was drawn outside the family to find such love. The platonic intimacy, or at times the sexual intimacy, of a stranger. He would be quite old before he recognized that about himself, before he could ask even himself that question of whom he loved most.(225)
It was her beauty he did not want to lose, the grace of her, the limbs. He knew he already had her nature tight in his fist.(248)
There were traditions he had covered in Herodotus in which old warriors celebrated their loved ones by locating and holding them in whatever would made them eternal-a colorful fluid, a song, a rock drawing.(248)
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed as if trees, fears we have hidden as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography to be marked by nature.(261)
To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement .
Tenderness towards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tenderness to the self.(49)
Throughout the war, with all of her worst patients, she survived by keeping a coldness hidden in her role as a nurse. I will survive this.I won't fall apart at this.(48)
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