“You have an appalling nature,” she began. “You puff yourself up like a bullfrog, and one day you’ll explode. The only thing you’re good for is getting your friend in the helicopter to make trees dance by trickery. You never grasp what is simple. You always go round the back when the entrance is at the front.”
Once again her face changed. She was like someone standing in strong sunlight on a mountain top, looking back down the valley from which she had emerged and trembling with the memory still in her bones of the length and nature of the road she had travelled, the glaciers and forded rivers, the weariness and danger, and conscious of how far she still had to go. There was also compassion in that face, a feeling of pity for all the poor people below, who knew only that the peaks were rosy in the twilight, but not the real meaning of the road itself.
“Your ideas about everything are very different from mine. You were taught how to do a thousand things, but not to be aware of what really matters. Can’t you see that there’s no point in trying to dazzle me? I don’t want anyone unless they are completely mine. You like to put everyone in a box, and then produce them whenever they’re needed: this is my girlfriend, this my cousin, and this my elderly godmother. This is my love, this is my doctor, and this pressed flower is from the island of Rhodes. Just let me be.
'Emerence', The Door by Magda Szabo
