Timothy Lawrence

“The military band did not make things easier. Having detected a larger than usual turnout of British travelers, and waiting with some infernal clairvoyance until Cyprian thought he had a grip on himself, just as he turned to bid Yashmeen a breezy arrivederci, they began to play an arrangement for brass of ‘Nimrod’ – what else? – from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Teutonic bluntness notwithstanding, at the first major-seventh chord, an uncertainty of pitch among the trumpets contributing its touch of unsought innocence, Cyprian felt the tap opening decisively. It was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered her lips. He was concentrating on not getting her vestee wet. The music took them for an instant in its autumnal envelope, shutting out the tourist chatter, the steam horns and quayside traffic, in as honest an expression of friendship and farewell as the Victorian heart had ever managed to come up with, until finally, the band moved mercifully on to ‘La Gazza Ladra.’ It wasn’t till Yashmeen nodded and released him that Cyprian realized they had been holding each other.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“And, to tell finally my greatest service,
I've kept him from a thousand vicious acts,
for low and vile things could never serve to give him satisfaction
(a young many shy and modest in his acts
and thoughts) once he'd become her slave and vassal;
she made so deep a mark
upon his heart, that he must emulate her...

"Again, and this is what I'll finish with,
I gave him wings to fly beyond the skies
by means of mortal things,
which make a ladder to our Maker, rightly used...”
― Petrarch, Canzoniere

“Love is Holiness and Divine Indignation; the placidity of an ordinary married life is the veil of a spiritual passage into profound things. Nor is this all; the lover knows himself also to be the cross upon which the Beloved is to be stretched, and so she also of her lover. A suggestion of this — probably no more — is to be found merely in the fact of her existence the sense of being for ever intimately bound to another which when it is not repose is agony, the state of suspension upon a substance alien and unavoidable for which, though from a more dreadful distance, crucifixion is the only comparison. There is no middle state into which this issues — either it is continued into an anguish of entire repulsion and hate, or, by the grace of that Crucifixion which includes it but is so much more than it alone, it becomes itself a purgation and a redemption. This is — in its degree, and who shall say how terrific that degree may become? — the annihilation of the selfhood which the saints have sought, and the end of it is union.”
― Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology