Henry Le Nav

“Before going to bed, I sometimes wander out onto the terrace to view the night sky. Most of the time I can’t see it; the urban incandescence is so bright that no stars are visible. But the windows across the courtyard are glowing. Behind them, people are watering plants, baking bread, fixing radiators, flipping television channels. Other windows are curtained, and beyond them, people might even be making love. Good for them. I wish them well. It’s not easy to be successfully sexual these days, and perhaps it never was. I do what I can to help.”
― Avodah K. Offit, Night Thoughts: Reflections of a Sex Therapist

“But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.”
― John Updike, Couples

“Pretty bows on a pile of sh$t only make it harder to flush.”
― Kimberly McCreight, A Good Marriage