quote: know

"For the first time I ceased hovering over the earth where I had only landed from time to time to taste and try a flavor of neighborhood or of race, of person, place or thing...I will always be trying to penetrate into the mysterious varieties of human nature, though with perhaps a different motive.  Self-preservation had been the greatest need, and what I had called love the tool to draw out of the human material at hand the various mysterious savors of life.  In order to lose the sense of death and isolation that was my solitary mode of being, how often I had flung myself into fictitious relationships in order to escape the conviction that I was nothing in myself!  I had called it love, when at its best it had been a certain chemical magnetism motivated by curiosity, the curiosity of the damned seeking the chance of salvation.  This combination of magnetism and curiosity was a potent one.  It had enabled me to know and understand people.  It had been a kind of searchlight fastened on my head as I groped through a dark world.  Whereas a person like Andrew concentrates upon an idea, or on an occupation like collecting or painting, all his attention upon it until every secret part of it is revealed to him, so I had done with people and always will, I suppose, though much blame has been put upon me for it at one time and another, and still is sometimes now.  Never mind.  Never mind the blame and the shame, the hurts and the regrets, the burned fingers and the angry looks.  I know what I know.  I know what it cost us all and I know what it has been worth." 

-- Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert