Jessica’s Reviews > The Charmed Wife > Status Update

All I'm saying is, I bet he's not the villain in his mind. Everyone is the hero of his own story.

In Shakespeare's times...any story that ended with marriage was considered a comedy. Doesn't that strike our modern sensibilities as ironic? I'd say the ending would depend largely on the beginning, and none of these beginnings seem particularly promising to me. You can't have the right answer to the wrong question....And expectations play a vital part, as well.

and in time, her tender ministrations made him soft and gentle in her hands, a new, caring, sensitive man. Now they should be happy together, but she is getting bored—and gradually, she is beginning to understand that what she loved was not the man himself, nor the beast, but her own near-magical power to effect the transformation from the one to the other.

but by now I know enough about love and princes to discern, behind the cheery inflections of their genteel fantasies, beneath the cherry veneer of their civilized mid-century dwellings, the dark, heady danger of primitive transformations, the rank odors of beasts prowling through the woods.

...this is not the face I thought of as mine for so long, the unchanging face of a young bride with rosy lips and a gaze ever widened in anticipation of conjugal happiness—and yet I see, my heart sinking, that it is a familiar face all the same.

I assumed that his death would liberate me, once and for all, from the confines of impersonal fairy-tale destiny—but am I fooling myself, am I simply driven to take yet another predictable step in a predictable story?

Hate traps you just as much as love does. Because hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.

But whenever I thought this, another voice, much older than that of a seven-year-old, would steal into my mind. Ah, but love for a man is nothing like love for a child, it would say in a sly, silky whisper. It is more like the sun that burns bright in your eyes, is it not—and when the sun is gone and you close your eyes, defeated, its afterimage is blackness. The afterimage of this kind of love is hate.