...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives

It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.

On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so he hoped.

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.

Once you break someone’s heart, you are forever its master.

Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.