Maitland

“But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take. It is indeed a fearful gamble. Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation. It takes a lifetime to learn another person. When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Your word of honor?” “The word of your enemy,” José Arcadio Buendía said. And he added in a bitter tone: “Because I must tell you one thing: you and I are still enemies.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In a time haunted by drought, plague, and war, with no social or medical services available to the average person, with public literacy and the scientific method unheard of, skeptical thinking was rare.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark