A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.

A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.

How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true.

How nearly is natural affection connected with the love of God (for if we love not our Brother whom we have seen how can we love God whom we have not seen how can we love God whom we have not seen), but I live in hopes and expectation of several upon the road, which may arrive, perhaps sooner than I expect.

Patton would have said a warmer goodbye to his horse, The author writes on Eisenhower's cold dismissal of his wartime lover.

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old.