But to see her was to love her, Love but her, and love forever. Had we never lou'd sae kindly, Had we never lou'd sae blindly, Never met - or never parted - We had ne'er been broken hearted
To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach.
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.
I'd worried that letting her get too close would break me. Unfortunately, I'd worried about that a little too late. Because I was broken. The Cage I was before Eva no longer existed. As much as I didn't want to admit it, I'd fallen in love with her. I'd allowed someone in and she hadn't want me. I hadn't been good enough. I never was.
As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but never tasted any omelette.
I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.