"This was not happiness, it was a hunger of the soul, it was painful yearning"
2008-06-03, 11:57 a.m.

From Maugham's "Of Human Bondage"

" He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish he had never known before. He tried to think when it had first come to him. He did not know. He only remembered that each time he had gone into the shop, after the first two or three times, it had been with a little feeling in the heart that was pain and he remembered that when she spoke to him he felt curiously breathless. When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair . . . he wondered how he was going to endure that ceaseless aching of his soul"

I just LOVED that bit, and just before this there was another passage of him being in love with love itself. Of being repulsed by the actual act of love and being with someone, but in love with the idea of being in love. If I can find it again I'll post it .
I LOVE this book!!