The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Read this in three settings (days). Could be quicker if you sit and focus, but I can't just sit still for too long.

Great book by Thorton Wilder. There are a lot of passages I can't find and can't begin to remember, but here are some great ones I found...

"'Even now,' she thought, 'almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'"

"'...you're not allowed to kill yourself; you know you're not allowed. Everybody knows that. But if you jump into a burning house to save somebody, that wouldn't be killing yourself.'"

"Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. 'I am alone, alone, alone,' he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain ... He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, 'We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes.'"

"The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs. Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song. Next she lost her belief in the sincerity of those about her. She secretly refused to believe that anyone (herself excepted) loved anyone. All families lived in a wasteful atmosphere of custom and kissed one another with secret indifference. She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest of friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires."