Helen Simonson

Despite his attempts to maintain a vigorous structure of errands, golf games, visits, and meetings, there were sometimes days like this one, filled with rain and touched with a gnawing sense of parts missing from life. When the slick mud ran in the flower beds and the clouds smothered the light, he missed his wife.

But it's not enough to be in love. It's about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it's what work you do ... Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.

We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.

I miss being a student," said Abdul Wahid. "I miss the passionate discussions with my friends, and most of all the hours among the books.

You Anglo-Saxons have largely broken away from such dependence on family. Each generation feels perfectly free to act alone and you are not afraid.

They sat a moment in embrace of silent mutual comfort, which was, she often thought, the reward of those long married.

My parents told me to marry for money,' said her husband. 'But I chose the love of a strong woman.''And look what trouble I turned out to be,' she said.

At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ..."You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.

...as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.

You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care__nd humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?" "My dear boy," said the Major. "Is there really any other kind?

Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and grey winter of the spirit.

War does have a way of interfering with one's most closely held desires.

...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.

I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead," she replied, an acid tone in her voice. "Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wife from Pakistan. In exchange, I will be given houseroom and no doubt, the honor of taking care of several small children of other family members."The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather.

He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.

He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter__he impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.

My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets.

Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.