Diaries, 1922: “The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’, that is all that I have known, nothing more.”
“Your love for me is not in love with you” is so much nicer than my silly paraphrase in the title….Also: “the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’.”
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 