Mary
But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost true self forever.
Mary
We’ve loved each other. We always will! Let’s remember only that, and not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped- the things life has done to us we cannot exercise or explain.
Mary
The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.
Edmund
Who wants to see life as it is, if they can hep it? It’s the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it’s Pan. You see him and you die- that is, inside you- and have to go on living as a ghost.
Edmund
(He recites Baudelaire’s prose poems.)
If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
Edmund
The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she build around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, that’s the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately - to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!
