O.K., I admit it, I can’t stop reading Thomas H. Cook and writing down the choice bits of prose I come across. Like these lines from one of his best books Breakheart Hill:

I thought of her all the way home that evening, though I can’t remember in what way I thought of her, and because of that I can only surmise that I had begun to feel her around me in a way that was not only sensuous and full of yearning, but shadowy and mysterious as well, and that this mysteriousness was also oddly seductive.

In a car alone, watching her home for those few seconds before I pulled out of the driveway, I felt the exquisite agony both of her nearness and her distance, and I can say now, after the passage of three decades, that it was the most delicious torment I have ever felt, the single, searing instant when, in all my life, I was most fully alive.

For the first time I felt my physical yearning as something separate from myself, a creature strapped within my skin, pent up and explosive, barely within the grip of my control.

I saw Kelli hovering over me in the airless darkness of my room, her eyes pupilless and unlighted, her hair a dark tangle of vine and forest bramble, an object of romantic dream that had become romantic nightmare.

I could not stand her voice, or even the sight of her in the hallway, and yet, at the same time, I yearned for every glimpse of her.

And here’s a passage from A Separate Peace by John Knowles that seems to fit right in:

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve the most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

In that case I must have concealed well in these pages that I never think of her except as an object, as a theme; turn back the pages and you will see! At my age, one does not fall in love without becoming grotesque, without making even the Pharaohs laugh.

One needs solitude and darkness because of their quality of loftiness and religion, not because one flees the company of others and can endure only one’s own. Strange how all things pass distantly, yet all is near; we sit in an omnipresence. It must be God. It must be ourselves as a part of all things.

Was it not the poisonous mushroom that drove men berserker? But in the dawn of our own day, we die of a hair in the throat.