Vidal Gore — Eighteen Seventy [2425]

Looking at her in that—oh, for a superior word! lambent?—light framed in that fragment of time already lost as I write this late at night, I had the terrible sad sense that I would never be so happy again with anyone whom I so much—not loved, for that word is too suggestive of pain, not to mention banality—delighted in. — Vidal Gore, Eighteen Seventy, 2425

Note

The juxtaposition of ‘delighted in’ with the complexity of love reveals the narrator’s conflicted emotional state, beautifully encapsulating the tension between affection and its potential pain.