There are some things after all that Sally Owens knows for certain Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you tried to get them to see it the way you do And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesnt have any substance after allLike when youve split up with someone and you try to communicate the way you feel because you need to say the words need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is they never do. Plenty more fish in the sea theyll say or Youre better off without them or Do you want some of these potato chips They never really understand because they havent been there every day every hour. They dont know the way things have been the way that its made you the way it has structured your world. Theyll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They dont understand the history the background dont know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately they dont know you well enough and they never can. Everyones alone in their world because everybodys life is different. You can send people letters and show them photos but they can never come to visit where you live.Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

But when I do feel all the strength go out of me and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry then or at least I want to and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss one more word one more glance one more.

Theyre in love. Fuck the war.

She leaned forward and caught at his hand pressing it between her own. The touch was like white fire through his veins. He could not feel her skin only the cloth of her gloves and yet it did not matter. You kindled me heap of ashes that I am into fire. He had wondered once why love was always phrased in terms of burning. The conflagration in his own veins now gave the answer.

So much of the language of love was like that you devoured someone with your eyes you drank in the sight of him you swallowed him whole. Love was substance broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

Stephen kissed me in the springRobin in the fallBut Colin only looked at meAnd never kissed at all.Stephens kiss was lost in jestRobins lost in playBut the kiss in Colins eyesHaunts me night and day.

As lovers the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long but men only at times.

Of course Ill hurt you. Of course youll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence means accepting the risk of absence.

It does good to no woman to be flattered by a man who does not intend to marry her and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them which if unreturned and unknown must devour the life that feeds it and if discovered and responded to must lead ignis-fatuus-like into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.