Love is not a matter of choice but an obdurate fact of surrender.

Two quotations from a beautifully written novel, Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan:

I can only say it now. At the centre of himself, a man cannot choose whom to love. He can choose how to live and can honour the truth of himself where he may. But he cannot choose whom to love, any more than he can choose how tall he is or how good. One can take up platform shoes or fine deeds, but the heart will always have the last word, and when the word is love we can recognise, we can respond, we can submit and we can try to ignore, but we can never choose. Love is not a matter of choice but an obdurate fact of surrender. (p. 288-289)

Memory is a kind of friendship, a friendship with the more necessary parts of oneself. How often do we reach for the pasts’s genial knowledge to meet the unknowables of the present, asking once again that the anterior world might blossom into life and colour the current day? In this at least I cannot be alone. (p. 175)


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