1
" Who is Mr. Jasper?" Rosa turned aside her head in answering: " Eddy's uncle, and my music-master." " You do not love him?" " Ugh!" She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror." You know that he loves you?" " O, don't, don't, don't!" cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging to her new resource. " Don't tell me of it! He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of." She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her." Try to tell me more about it, darling." " Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold me the while, and stay with me afterwards." " My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way." " He has never spoken to me about - that. Never." " What has he done?" " He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever." " What is this imagined threatening, pretty one? What is threatened?" " I don't know. I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is." " And was this all, to-night?" " This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately hurt. It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn't bear it, but cried out. You must never breathe this to any one. Eddy is devoted to him. But you said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me - who am so much afraid of him - courage to tell only you. Hold me! Stay with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself. "
2
" This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. "
― Frédéric Gros , A Philosophy of Walking
4
" Perhaps I have misjudged you, Christopher,” Erienne commented as he whirled her about in a wide sweep of the ballroom.
“How so, my love?” He searched her face for some hint of her meaning.
“You watch over me as closely as Stuart,” she stated and grew thoughtful. “Perhaps more so.”
“I have not given up hope that you will someday become mine, madam, and I choose to safeguard against those who would take you from me.”
“What of Stuart?” She raised a lovely brow as she awaited his answer. It was a long moment before he gave a reply. “In the ways of love, I do not consider Stuart as much a threat as an inconvenience.”
“An inconvenience?” she queried.
“I shall have to deal with him in time, and that will be the difficult part. I cannot dismiss the man without rousing your hatred again. ’Tis a most perplexing problem.”
“You amaze me, Christopher.” Erienne shook her head, somewhat shocked by his casual disregard of her husband. “You truly amaze me.”
“The feeling is mutual, my love.” His voice came as a soft caress and sent an eddy of sensations spiraling down through the core of her being.
-Erienne & Christopher "
― Kathleen E. Woodiwiss , A Rose in Winter
6
" Yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sister how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars--she was all of them, and she was so much more that just just her that I still didn't know. "