Francesca

“And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“His mouth said: "Would you like to have dinner tonight?" For just the skin of a second, Miss Dearheart was surprised, but not half as surprised as Moist. Then her natural cynicism reinflated.
"I like to have dinner every night. With you? No. I have things to do. Thank you for asking."
"No problem," said Moist, slightly relieved.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“There wasn’t a man alive in Pern who hadn’t secretly cherished the notion that he might be able to Impress a dragon. That he could be linked for life to the love and sustaining admiration of these gentle great beasts. That he could transverse Pern in a twinkling, astride his dragon. That he would never suffer the loneliness that was the condition of most men - a dragonrider always had his dragon.”
― Anne McCaffrey, Dragonquest

“We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, ‘foreplay’. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me which I didn’t say out loud because they sounded so banal - Here we are, or, This again or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union which bound us all the more because of this prelude.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love