Having few interests to sustain her, over the next few years she fell into a vacant, mental decline.

Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.

She loves in a way that will make her suffer horribly.

I fell to thinking about my own life, now so debilitated, and reecting how short this life is, even in health, I began to weep about our wretched state. Sighing deeply, I said to myself: ‘One day, inevitably, even your most gracious Beatrice must die.’ This thought threw me into such a state of bewilderment that I closed my eyes, and I began, like a person who is delirious, to be tormented by these fantasies.

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

. . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . .

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

Goddamn but her mind was so exhausted with trying to hold the world together, tired of being the living glue for herself, as if she let go, great pieces of her life would shatter and fall off in mockery of the apocalypse.

...misery had her dwelling in my heart...

Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.

And I'm a woman made of sorrow.

She had been so consumed with escaping her own misery, she hadn't considered the misery she might inflict.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.