She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.Charles Frazier
About This Quote
When you have a goal, a wish, a dream, a vision in your mind and you have been holding on to it for a long time, then it's safe to say that you have been waiting for that one person who would complete your idea or wish. You have been looking for that one person who will make everything come true. In this case, Inman was talking about his wish to kiss the back of his wife’s neck. However, it is also possible that Inman was wishing for something else.
And he had waited until he found the right moment to make his wish come true. Perhaps it is possible that Inman was wishing for a family of his own, a family that would be complete without a mother. Perhaps he was longing to go back in time and be with his wife when she was younger and less worried about the future.
Source: Cold Mountain
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