G.G. Rowley

He had said to Evie when

He had said to Evie when they came home--he had said something like "Why don't people ever say anything real?" And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing, to be alive. p.180

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant....

For a good [husband] contains so many persons in [himself]. What was [he] not to me?

For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives--to both, but perhaps especially to the woman--a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

[B]ereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. [...] [W]e must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very [him], and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of [him]. And you want [him] to; you want [him] with all [his] resistances, all [his] faults, all [his] unexpectedness. That is, in [his] foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after [he] is dead. But "this" is not now imaginable. In that respect [he] and all the dead are like God.