Steven L. Peck

A damned man struggles to find meaning in a library, the dimensions of which are measured in light years.

A Short Stay in Hell

kamille

I think our love could have lasted forever. I'm sure it would have. She was so ... no, I won't cheapen it by trying to express it in words and short sentences. I loved her. That is enough.

But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?

“Did I know her only for so short a time? Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.” 

plantdad

Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real. What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden? So I pick up another book. Open it. See a page of random characters. Toss it over the edge. Pick up another. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat . . .

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope's finest expression. In hope's loss, however, is the greatest despair.

Ruben Ruiz

How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

A Short Stay in Hell quotes

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