I cannot be with someone who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on me, someone who can’t love me.

I am crying over the loss of something I never had. How ridiculous. Mourning something that never was – my dashed hopes, dashed dreams, and my soured expectations.

It's much easier to wear your pain on the outside...

Love is for fools, Christian.

Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.

'God Almighty,' he would groan, 'she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.'

So you see the man really loved her.
("The Tiger")

Why weren’t you beautiful? That would’ve solved everything.’
('Left from Dhakeshwari')