Nayusha

“There are certain people who if they are absent life becomes hard to bear. …. These are the people who once sat close to you in Paradise.' It is a beautiful idea, isn't it….”
― Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

“[…] fantasy does not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural tendency to realise itself: to remake the world in its own image. The harmless wanker with the video-machine can at any moment, turn into the desperate rapist with a gun. The 'reality principle' by which the normal sexual act is regulated is a principle of personal encounter, which enjoins us to respect the other person, and to respect, also, the sanctity of his body, as the tangible expression of another self. The world of fantasy obeys no such rule, and is governed by monstrous myths and illusions which are at war with the human world — the illusions, for example, that women wish to be raped, that children have only to be awakened in order to give and receive the intensest sexual pleasure, that violence is not an affront but an affirmation of a natural right. All such myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding world. They render the world unsafe for self and other, and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an end in himself, but as a possible means to his private pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been 'fetishised', to use the apt Marxian term, and every other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of the expendability and replaceability of the other.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“And may those who have known what it means to lose control of themselves throw the first stone at me. My only allegiance was to love itself.”
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

“Maybe a love like that came to a person only once in a lifetime? Once was enough, maybe.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance