Twilight..

How the miracle of our meeting
Shone there and sang,
I didn't want to return
From there to anywhere.
Happiness instead of duty
Was bitter delight to me.
Not obliged to speak to anyone,
I spoke for a long while.
Let passions stifle lovers,
Demanding answers,
We, my dear, are only souls
At the limits of the world.

Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

The child within us....

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative? 

~Cesare Pavese

The white rose...

The red rose whispers of passion, And the white rose breathes of love; O, the red rose is a falcon, And the white rose is a dove.     

John Boyle O'Reilly

I was too young....

    She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince