Love Byte # 21 - Books and Me - Guest Post by Sneha

Hey , I hope you're loving the series ..

Me , I enjoyed doing my first post so much that I'm back again for my second one ..hope you enjoy it :)

I confess I am, unabashedly, a romantic at heart. I just adore romance novels. There are just so many which I like. From the classics like Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Blue Castle (by L.M Montgomery, I just love, love, love the book) to the more popular Judith Macnaught’s. I especially like reading such novels set in historical time, it adds that little extra something.

Following are excerpts which stayed on with me after I finished reading them. I keep going back to the magic of these books time and again : )

This extract is from Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Here Catherine explains her relation with Heathcliff and Linton, when Nelly questions her about it.

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond yourself. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My greatest miseries in the world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is in himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods.Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath- a source of little visible delight but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always on my mind – not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself – but as my own being …”

The following two excerpts are from the book Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. Today, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, become a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas.

Not for me the languor and the subtlety (of love) I had read about in books. The challenge and the chase. The sword-play, the swift glance, the stimulating smile. The art of provocation was unknown to me, and I would sit with his map upon my lap, the wind blowing my dull, lanky hair, happy in his silence, yet eager for his words. Whether he talked or not made little difference to my moods. My only enemy was the clock on the dashboard, whose hands would move relentlessly to one o’ clock. We drove east, we drove west, amidst the myriad villages that cling like limpets to the Mediterranean shore, and today I remember none of them.

This one is from my all time favourites “Blue Castle” by L.M Montgomery.

“Valancy was perfectly happy. Some things dawn on you slowly. Some things came by lightning flashes. Valancy had had a lightning flash. She knew quite well no that she loved Barney. Yesterday she had been all her own. Now she was this man’s. Yet he had done nothing – said nothing. He had not even looked at her as a woman. But that didn’t matter. Nor did it matter what he was or what he had done. She loved him without any reservations. Everything in her went out wholly to him. She had no wish to stifle or disown her love. She seemed to be his so absolutely that thought apart from him – thought in which he did not predominate – was an impossibility. She had realized, quite simply and fully, that she loved him, in that moment when he was leaning on the car door explaining that Lady Jane (car) had no gas. She looked deep into his eyes in the moonlight and had known. In that infinitesimal space of time everything was changed. Old things passed away and all things became new.

She was no longer unimportant, little old maid Valancy Stirling. She was a woman full of love and therefore rich and significant – justified to herself. Life was no longer empty and futile, and death could cheat her of nothing. Love had cast out her last fear…