30 Quotes by Ray Smith

For the people of her town—and she would guess the vast majority of humanity—observed the world not with their minds and imagination but solely with their eyes, which was a severe limitation.

Love is manifested everywhere else, in a million other couples worldwide, and probably a few not far from where I am driving, up the freeway, through a world I thought I knew but admit that I don’t know at all.

A minute after Bethanee had disappeared into the back, John emerged. Gorgeous, damp-haired John in his form-fitting denims. The Marlboro Man minus the nicotine-stained fingers and, admittedly, the thirty-inch waist.

I am merely at the midway point in the novel of my own life. On around page 250 of a 500-page tale. There’s no reason why the next 250, 300, or even 350 pages will not be far more exciting than the first half.

Her time with John, brief though it was, showed her that love and adventure are very much real. They are not only the fantasies conjured up by writers, musicians, and filmmakers. They exist in the real world. Magic exists—a two-word phrase that, before her forty-eight-year-old self met John, she would’ve considered the ultimate in naiveté and self-delusion.

There is no end to that kind of love, even if the lovers’ bodies ceased to exist in this world. No, that love is manifested everywhere else, in a million other couples worldwide, and probably a few not far from where I am driving, up the 405 freeway, through a world I thought I knew but admit that I don’t know at all.

Except those images weren’t exact captures of reality. No, the Camera Eye was also suffused with what photographers called the Golden Hour—the gilt-tinted hour following sunrise and preceding sunset, when the world was awash with russet rays and even the meanest streets were aglow as if in an Arthurian legend. Every moment spent with John was like that, reality beyond reality. Richer, realer, rawer than reality. These were the moments she remembered most.

He walked beside her, in front of her, behind her. He tried not to be overwhelmed by her fragrance and sheer presence. Yet, beyond the near-overwhelming desire for Molly Valle, he felt something else. It was as if the hands of some internal clock had long been off-kilter and had, at last, rearranged themselves into the correct positions.

John knew the best love stories were the ones that were never told. For no medium—no book, no poem, no play or movie—could ever tell a love story in its entirety, its full span and depth, from the exhilarating beginning to the tragic ending of all love stories. He didn’t mind if his life was forgotten—it had never occurred to him to want to be remembered—as long as he had truly lived, and to live life without experiencing one great love story was to not live at all.