6
" [Cole Doherty] 'You're asking the wrong person. I don't believe unconditional love is a human emotion.'
'Really?' June [Briscoe] tends to believe this, too, but she's never said it out loud.
'Strongest drive in any mammal, and I limit it to mammals just because they're my area of specialized knowledge, is to avoid pain. It takes a lot to overcome that. But people, and animals, they do it all the time. They put themselves in mortal danger to save their children. But emotional pain is different. If your love is getting pushed back at you, that unconditional river of it, you can avoid the pain so easily by draining out the water. "
― Stacey Swann , Olympus, Texas
13
" June has always been wrong in her assumptions about love--so wrong, in fact, that at this point she should assume the opposite of what she believes and then be right for once in her life. The most ridiculous, looking back, was her assumption that true love bestowed a contentment that blotted out all else. June blamed her assumption on the books she had read from ages ten to sixteen, even though she could blame herself for not noticing what the books showed bore no resemblance to her firsthand experience of matrimony, her parents. June had figured the problems lay in her parents as human beings and not some defect of love. She hadn't yet learned that since love was the creation of two people, and people were always defective in one way or another, then the love itself was necessarily flawed. She knew that now, definitively. "
― Stacey Swann , Olympus, Texas