more thoughts on quotes

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul."
-James Joyce

See, so there's no way to eject completely someone you've once loved, depressing as it is (although I think Joyce is using a very exclusive definition of "love" here, only really talking about The Greatest Connection of Your Life--thus far, anyway)...they'll leave an imprint you'll carry with you throughout life. Of course, we have to muster up the energy to venture into another's soul. We're almost programmed to do it, and sometimes we repeat the same mistakes or, alternately, seek out the same wonderful qualities in our new partners.

Similarly, from Ulysses:
"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."

Because we astound ourselves continually like this, how is it that we can ever embrace anyone else's various characters, too? We're constantly navigating our own stories, each others', those of places, cities, nations, and must be constantly flexible. You've got to let others tell their own stories and get to know their own unique characters, because they're subject to change:

For the truth is that you can never simply 'go back', to home or to anywhere else. When you get 'there' the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point. For to open up 'space' to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as the product of interrelations. You can't go back in space-time. To think that you can is to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories. It may be 'going back home', or imagining regions as backward, as needing to catch up, or just taking that holiday in some 'unspoilt, timeless' spot. The point is the same. You can't go back. You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to 'now', but where that 'now' is itself constituted by nothing more than--precisely--that meeting-up (again).
-Massey

What's left? A kind of patient consubstantiality, really--a constant state of being in another person's shoes as well as your own, sharing the same plight of self-discovery, on equal wavelengths.