I can only say that I could
not make His way my own. For I have found
the constant, everlasting weather
of man's life to be, not love, but loneliness. Love itself is
not the weather of
our lives. It is the rare, the precious flower. Sometimes it is
the flower that gives us life, that breaches the
dark walls of all our loneliness
and restores us to the
fellowship of life, the family of the earth,
the brotherhood of man. But sometimes
love is the flower that
brings us death; and from it we get pain and
darkness; and the mutilations of the soul,
the maddening of the brain, may be in it.
—Thomas Wolfe