I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.
The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconce...
All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be brea...
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being. No one was shallow. Not really.
Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks. Life itself had become a secret affair.
