The History of Romance
by attica
Rating: PG-13
status: one-shot
summary: He didn’t know a thing about romance. And romance sure as hell didn’t know a thing about him. He thought he was supposed to find comfort in this balance of mutual cluelessness and neglect, but he didn’t find any at all.
 

Part 2

"This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."

-J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

 

“In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.”

-The Things they Carried, Tim O’Brien.