How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop. . Donna Tartt
About This Quote

This quote is by Sylvia Plath and it really describes how we feel when we are in love. Its meaning is that we want to live and we want to be with the person we love. What we remember most about our loved ones is how they make us feel and what we do and say and do and say and do. We remember the things that made them laugh or cry or smile or look at us with love. The last line of the poem says, “There were nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop” because when you are sick you are not thinking clearly, you are not able to think of the consequences of your actions.

Source: The Goldfinch

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