Panenka

Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don't mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.

But isn’t that what allowing yourself be loved is all about – letting something greater than fear into your life?

Sometimes I want to take on the whole world and then there are other times … when all I want is for the world to take care of me.

Relationships never truly ended, and even when people faded from you their effect was preserved somewhere in the particle physics of experience where everything is a compound made up of traces of everything else.

I think I was in this state where I needed to be surrounded by love but couldn't let it touch me.

Let’s not name it. Once you name something, you have to define it: say what it is and isn’t. Not to mention maintenance. All the relationships with names – parent, sister, husband, lover – come with maintenance. All that effort keeping it to what it’s supposed to be. Shouldn’t we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement. How about it, Joseph? How about you just try to make me happy, and I’ll try and do the same for you?

Life should always be like that. Resting safely, with someone looking over you, attending to the little indulgences that loved people enjoy

Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don’t mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.

To him love was no union between two otherwise incomplete halves, but more like the gravity that locked two bodies into the same orbit

But illness meant dependency. It was society’s last chance to push the benefits of membership.

For so long I was afraid to stay close to anybody because I had so much anger and confusion inside me. I knew that I couldn't let anyone into my life until all that had passed. The problem I could never solve was how to relate to people in the meantime. Other people's love is frightening when you're suffering. It's overwhelming. When you're consumed with the effort of processing internal pain, it becomes impossible to do anything else. It's like holding your breath under water: you realise that you need to breathe but if you breathe at the wrong time, you drown. I only survived thanks to the people in my life -- people I repaid by letting them down.

You were like a dangerous sun: even at a distance you could still burn me... You were close enough to exist, but never close enough to hold onto.

Panenka, guilty of one thing, had by extension become guilty of all things

Habituated loneliness was bearable, but the heart was not built to endure glimpses of what it could never truly have.

There were times, she would admit, when for all her heroic independence, her sacred resilience, she would have liked to trust her weight to the love of another person like that. To fall backwards in absolute security. But she had only known doubting love. Love that needed to be weighed against what it cost. She was exhausted. Everything was so hard.

But it was too late. He had already slipped into a deep depression and developed a dangerous indifference to himself. To describe it as sadness would be to ascribe a degree of feeling that was lacking in him during that period which lasted for — who knows? — perhaps weeks, months, or maybe almost twenty-five years.

But whatever is lost, something else always grows back in its place. A big tree falls in a storm, a hundred-year-old tree that’s utterly irreplaceable, and yet when the tree goes, so does its shade. And when it’s gone, there’s light for the first time and something different grows back in its place.

But why should we have to wait until we’re happy before we can be loved? Before letting someone in? It’s the hurt people who need love the most, who deserve it most, who understand it most.

Loneliness is a torch: it can show you things about yourself.

After all, a few crumbs of love could be made to last a long time if they are all you have.

The important rules of relationships are the same for friends as they are for boyfriends. One: stay close. Two: don’t do bad shit. Three: cheering each other the fuck up. That’s the basic formula.

A man should mix with people who are at different stages of life. That’s what keeps you open minded.

A person who travels is no sooner back and settled into their old routine than they are already mooning over pictures of their next destination. They are never mentally and physically in the same place for long. When they travel they are full of daydreams about their real life back home, and when at home they project how things would be so much better if they were in Santiago or Khartoum, or even a little B&B fifty miles down the road overlooking a bay. Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don’t mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them. A traveller can’t possibly understand the world, because most of the people in the world have no choices and no options. In other words, they are poor bastards, God help them.

She convinced everyone, including herself, that the past couldn't be mended with a watchmaker's curiosity about how it worked.

He dried his hair, which he wore as he had always worn it: a practical footballer’s cut, short all round with a side parting and tidy fringe, which, when it fell onto his forehead, as it did now, told him it was time for a trim. At Donnie’s nobody was ever asked what style they wanted: they simply got a shorter version of what they already had. Donnie had learned to cut hair in the army and viewed barbering as something akin to getting your toenails cut or brushing your teeth. It was a maintenance job, and not something to develop ideas about.

Only you can know if you’re doing this to escape what happened to your parents, but I can tell you this, as someone who wishes only good things for you: trying not to repeat someone else’s history is a wasteful way to live.