41
" I’ve sometimes regretted the women I’ve been.
There have been so many: daughter, sister, cop, tough broad, several kinds of whore, jilted lover, ideal wife, heroine, killer.
I’ll provide the truth of them all, inasmuch as I’m capable of telling the truth.
Keeping secrets, telling lies, they require the same skill. Both become a habit, almost an addiction, that’s hard to break even with the people closest to you, out of the business.
They say never trust a woman who tells you her age; if she can’t keep that secret, she can’t keep yours.
I’m fifty-nine. "
― Becky Masterman
49
" Running away?" He taunted, as I drew my glamour to me, feeling it surge beneath my skin. " Always a coward, weren't you, prince? Never had the guts to really go for the kill." " You're right," I murmured, startling him. He frowned in wary surprise, and I smiled. " I always regretted my words against Puck. There was always a part of me that didn't want to go through with it." I lowered my blade, touching the tip to the floor. Ice spread from the point of the weapon, coating the ground and the walls, freezing the mirrors with sharp crinkling sounds." But with you," I continued, narrowing my eyes, " it's different. You're the part of him that I hate. The part that revels in the chaos you cause, the lives you destroy. And I can say this with complete certainty - killing you will be a pleasure. "
51
" Besides, those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. As consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief, and as their grief is an emanation from that person, it is there, in their grief itself, that they must in the end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for as long as they turn it over in their minds this grief will continue to show them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted creature, at one moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to see her, since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have first to make her suffer, at another so pleasant that the pleasantness in which one has invested her one adds to her own stock of good qualities and finds in it a fresh reason for hope. "
― Marcel Proust , In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
56
" In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation of because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noted that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn't even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents' attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don't adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn't the same as knowing - and having others know - that the one who went the other way was my own brother.
pp. 175-176 "
― Leonardo Padura , El hombre que amaba a los perros