Close Off Quotes

How long can human beings ache before their hearts close off the wound? ~ Lewis Perdue

Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing...enduring...waiting. ~ May Sarton

The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry ... Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone's benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I'm here, Sorcha.
I would not believe it at first; it had been so long since he had touched my mind in this way.
I'm here. Try to let go, dear one. I know how it hurts. Lean on me; let me take your burden for a while.
I could scarcely see him; he was on the far side of the fire, behind the others and half turned away, with his head still in his hands. It seemed as if he had scarcely moved at all.
How can you? How can you know?
I know. Let me help you.
I felt the strength of his mind flow into mine, and somehow he managed to close off the terrible, the dark and secret things that he had dreaded sharing with me, and fill my head with pictures of all that was good and brave. ~ Juliet Marillier

In life, when stuff happens the instinct is to close off your heart. By leaving your heart open, it leaves room for someone else to come in. ~ Jane Seymour

How did he close off that part of his brain that tells someone they've harmed another soul?...Most frighteningly of all, are some of us born with no conscience at all? ~ Dan Skinner

Her evil cannot reach us here. Let us burn the ancient tree-mace trees and close off the ancient ways. Tear down the tower, the crown of our barrow, and let us hide ourselves from evil. Let no one leave the mound, and if evil grows, we shall flee farther.
No! Let evil hear the pounding of our feet! Let evil hear our drumming and our chanting songs of war. Let evil fear us! Let evil flee! In any world, may dark things know our names and fear. May their vile skins creep and shiver at every mention of the faeren. Let the night flee before the dawn and darkness crowd into the shadows. We march to war!
- Nudd, the Chestnut King ~ N.D. Wilson

Growing up closes so many doors. The modern world doesn't allow for miracles, so we don't see them. It's a very precious gift, an open mind, but it's not passive. You've got to nurture it like a bed of roses; otherwise it will wither and die. Make sure you don't close off your mind to things you find strange. Sometimes they may be the only truth. ~ Tim Lebbon

It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas. ~ Norman Lock

Don't tense up no matter what, for you only close off creative power when you do. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you're coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together. ~ Pema Chodron

Gregori turned the full power of his magnetic silver eyes on her. "I can make the earth shake beneath your feet and bring lightning from the sky to do my bidding. I can close off your airway with a thought. I am all things from a mouse to a wolf running free. Is this not enough for you to believe?" he inquired softly. ~ Christine Feehan

You're not the kind of person to just randomly fall in love. You're way too . . ."
My eyes shoot to his. "Too what?"
"Well, you know, emotionally closed off."
"I will emotionally close off every orifice in your face if you don't shut up about this right now. ~ Rachel Morgan

The present moment is all that ever is, and in each new moment we die and are reborn. For example, people block love and close off their hearts out of fear of being hurt again. If they lived in the present moment, there would be no fear and they would walk forward in life with confidence and certainty that there is the joy of new experiences to be had. ~ Alaric Hutchinson

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends' parents…

Then
I've got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediati ~ Kate Rushin

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present, and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential title and conversational foundations of our identity. ~ David Whyte

Tactical catastrophes are rarely the outcome of a single poor decision. Small compromises incrementally close off options until a commander is forced into actions he would never choose freely. ~ Nathaniel Fick

It was a pretty common reaction when someone lost a person they loved; to close off and try to refuse to care or let anyone close. The bitch of it was that there was no way to guard against losing again and again. ~ Madeleine Urban

The barriers of impossibility, which close off the field of reality to our dreams and desires, were shattered, and his thoughts drifted exuberantly through the unattainable, fired by their own movement. ~ Marcel Proust

I AM in control. I AM the only authority in my life. I AM divinely protected by the light of my being. I close off my aura and body of light to the lower astral levels of mind, and I open to the spiritual world. Thank you, God, and so it is. ~ Susan Shumsky

Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth. ~ Jeremy Paxman

There are cities that are damned for some people by the mere fact that they seem created to close off the distances that are the only reason for living. ~ Julien Gracq

Anxiety is real. I went through anxiety around a time nobody really cared for it. I was a little girl and black folks are like okay get over over it, toughen up. No, it's real. I had an anxiety attack and it was so bad that I ripped all my close off and ran into the street. But now I'm a completely different person. With time you change and you don't experience that or confusion anymore. You don't care about unanswered questions. You just let it ride. ~ Paige Love-Rose

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. ~ Leon Uris

Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths - paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation. ~ Arthur Kleinman

The same uneven application of values applies in the weird worlds of academia and the think tanks. Like the media, they choose to close off their minds the moment that the question of Islam comes along. Most bizarre is that you can get away with saying anything, absolutely anything, so long as it is flattering of Islam. It doesn't matter how soppy, how sentimental, how completely unacademic it is: so long as it's about Islam, different standards apply. ~ Douglas Murray

If you don't think, and you have no wit and you have so many hangups that you can't look beyond your cup of coffee then you're never going to understand what I'm really saying. Because you know what? You're going to shut down and close off before you hear me. If I'm threatening you, you're going to see it the way you need to see it so you can dismiss me. ~ Tori Amos

Colorful posters with appealing statements like "Get into a good book this summer" and "We are going to force you into a good book this summer" and "You are going to get inside this book and we are going to close it on you and there is nothing you can do about it" have appeared overnight around the library entrance and in local shops and businesses... ~ Joseph Fink

Lucas didn't say anything as he lifted me up, sliding me onto his lap and pulling me close. Warmth surrounded me as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders. I sighed and followed along, putting my arms around his waist. I felt safe with him. Secure. It was like coming home. I ~ Aileen Erin

Sometimes I can't tell if you hate this place or love it."
"I love its potential. I hate its past. And I don't like what it is." She hugs her knees close to her chest. "The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family."
"How's that?"
She thinks about it for a long time. "Like isn't the same thing as love. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett

Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

His cell-phone rang. Dominic fumbled for it on the nightstand next to the couch, the dim lights not helping his endeavour. He had piercing, generic, banal fluorescent lights on his face all the time at work and at University, it was so bad it made him loathe even natural sunlight. Lucky this apartment's living room light had a dimmer. He flipped open his phone and said hello. 'Hey Dom, how you doin'?' a voice boomed. It was Ben. They proceeded to talk about the upcoming exams, which were deceptively close as it was week 10 at the moment. Yes, they would be alright. Yes, they would meet up afterwards. No, he hadn't studied more than Ben had. As he clapped the phone closed after the genial conversation reached its natural nadir, he had forgotten most of what had been said ~ T.P. Grish

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You're two inches shorter than you used to be. You're ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don't work as well as they once did and you can't open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don't have room for breakfast.
You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they're irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. ~ Nora Ephron

The sudden hand of Death close up mine eye! ~ William Shakespeare

After God, who is the central core pillar to any Christian marriage, there are four important marital relationship foundations. These are:

* Self-Esteem - if you don't love yourself you will find it almost impossible to accept love from others.

* Friendship - a strong friendship will sustain your marriage even when feelings of love are harder to find.

* Laughter - it will improve your quality of life, your health and your relationships

* Romance - feeling close to your partner can be the glue which holds your relationship together through the rough patches, but the absence of romance causes a void that problems will easily fill. ~ Karen M Gray

I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he's got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don't think the hero is supposed to be doing this. ~ Andrea Portes

[Jack Nicklaus] was the first to bring in course management. He could go to a course and tell you within one stroke what was going to win. He used to set his sights on that because he could shoot it. He was the only player I know who, if he decided he wanted to win a tournament, could go out and do it. No one will ever be as popular as Arnold Palmer and no one will ever come close to Jack as a player. ~ Lee Trevino

And I think it's often very hard for close friends to understand that sometimes you want them to be there but you don't have to say anything, that their presence is as powerful as anything else. ~ Robin Roberts

If Britain was to close down altogether overnight, then China would take up the slack of carbon emissions in two years. If America closed down, just the growth in China's emissions would replace America's emissions in 12 years. ~ Christopher Monckton

But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. ~ Dave Eggers

That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain. ~ Amy Tan

I become aware that once again the only empty seat is beside me. I shake my head as the thought crosses my mind that Christian might have purchased the adjacent seat so that I couldn't talk to anyone. I dismiss the idea as ridiculous - no one could be that controlling, that jealous, surely. I close my eyes as the plane taxis toward the runway. ~ E.L. James

That's the way to get young people. Once they see there are wonderful things to hunt for, to rediscover a species that was thought to be extinct or is extremely rare, to be the first to see a nest, to discover a new species unsuspected close to your home - these are things, I think, with a little education and excitement and the right kind of natural history would actually start a movement that makes going back to nature a profitable adventure. ~ E. O. Wilson

So, if someone like Richard Dawkins indignantly protests that his passion about these sorts of things -- the passion that drives the "God Delusion" -- should not be taken as a religious passion, I am happy to accept that. I do nevertheless think that often Dawkins and company show the sociological characteristics of the religious. This comes across particularly in what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences, the hatred of those who are close to them but not quite close enough. Just as evangelicals can differ bitterly over the true meaning of the host, so the New Atheists loathe people like me who (like them) have no religious belief but who think that science as such does not refute religion.
[Is Darwinism a Religion? - Michael Ruse] ~ Michael Ruse

I think the first decision I took when I became a government minister was to reverse the planned closure of Monklands Accident and Emergency. It's an issue close to my heart. ~ Nicola Sturgeon

"Rachel ... you need help."
I laugh and it's the same bitter laugh I remember him giving when we met so many weeks ago. "So do you."
"I love you." Isaiah says it so simply that my heart soars and sinks at the same time.
"I love you," I whisper. "Did you ever think that loving someone could hurt so bad?"
Isaiah shakes his head and stares out the window.
"What's going to happen to us?" I ask. Because I don't know how the two of us can continue forward. Isaiah refuses to let me in. It's sort of cruel. He's brought me close with his stories of his childhood and with his words of love, but he can't relinquish control. I refuse to be with someone who won't treat me as an equal. ~ Katie McGarry

There is the truth , the perception of truth, and versions that don't even come close; but it's the perception that creates the most conflict every time. ~ Johnnie Dent Jr.

Realism's anxieties are not my anxieties, but I think I've had its tools close at hand all along. It may be that I'm reaching for them more often than I used to. On the other hand, I'm making no promises for the future. The material itself always gets the last word. ~ Roy Kesey

My body becomes a raft and there's this part of me that wants just literally to go with the flow. To close my eyes and let it take me. But I know sooner or later I will have to get out, that I need to feel the earth beneath my feet, between my toes - the splinters, the bindi-eyes, the burning sensation of hot dirt, the sting of cuts, the twigs, the bites, the heat, the discomfort, the everything. I need desperately to feel it all, so when something wonderful happens, the contrast will be so massive that I will bottle the impact and keep it for the rest of my life. ~ Melina Marchetta

Get close to grass and you'll see a star. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

My mother has never been involved in my professional life. I am very close to my mother but we keep it on a mother-daughter basis and not a work-related basis. ~ Sheena Easton

Karaoke is something that's near and dear and very close to my heart. I was a karaoke host when I was working my way through university. I was a full-time student and karaoke was my night job. ~ Nathan Fillion

My earlier award was also based on a close collaborative effort. ~ John Bardeen

___It was night. There was a drizzle, so Emily's black Japanese umbrella was up. The two were close beneath it, walking in long strides, beautiful, sinister-looking lovers, narrow squared shoulders in dark coats. A tall pickup truck sped by and a was a phlem struck the edge of the pavement near where they were walking. Emily raised a finger, cocked her thumb, and said, "Bang."
___"Got the left rear tire." said Anthony.
___"The truck rolled," she added, "and burst into flames."
___"He's still alive," said Anthony, "climbing out of the broken rear window, his hair and clothes ablaze, screaming for help."
___"Punky boys come and piss on him," said Emily.
___The discussion was very quiet, very earnest.
___"They put out the fire from his burning body," said Anthony, "but he dies later in the burn ward."
___"His family is relieved and happy," said Emily with stunning finality.
___Twenty-four hours later the spitting driver dies on a suburban highway near his home, his pickup spinning out of control on black ice, the vehicle exploding into flame. Anthony and Emily never know about it, never guess a connection to their curse, having never thought of him a second time. ~ Jessica Amanda Salmonson

So close
I can almost touch you
But then you're gone
Like mist around the edge... ~ Staci Hart

Therm-bombs! Drop 'em right on us! I been roasted before - it's nothing! ~ Henry V. O'Neil

Isn't that what people say: it is better this way? Meaning I cannot bear it but I will. I will close my eyes and stumble forward into the darkness. ~ Peter Cameron

This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth. ~ Julien Gracq

When Dad pulled up in front of the house, the three of us sat still for a moment and stared at the gloomy pile of bricks my great-aunt called home. Up close, it looked even worse than it had from a distance. Ivy clung to the walls, spreading over windows and doors. A wisteria vine heavy with bunches of purple blossoms twisted around the porch columns. Paint peeled, loose shutters banged in the wind, slates from the roof littered the overgrown lawn.
Charles Addams would have loved it. So would Edgar Allan Poe. But not me. No, sir, definitely not me. Just looking at the place made my skin prickle.
Dad was the first to speak. "This is your ancestral home, Drew," he said, once more doing his best to sound excited. "It was built by your great-great-grandfather way back in 1865, right after the Civil War. Tylers have lived here ever since."
While Dad babbled about family history and finding your roots and things like that, I let my thoughts drift to Camp Tecumseh again. Maybe Martin wasn't so bad after all, maybe he and I could have come to terms this summer, maybe we--
My fantasies were interrupted by Great-aunt Blythe. Flinging the front door open, she came bounding down the steps. The wind ballooned her T-shirt and swirled her gray hair. If she spread her arms, she might fly up into the sky like Mary Poppins. ~ Mary Downing Hahn

Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles. ~ George Eliot

He got in beside her and impatiently reached for her seat belt, snapping it in place. "You always forget," he murmured, meeting her eyes.
Her breath came uneasily through her lips as she met that level stare and responded helplessly to it. He was handsome and sexy and she loved him more than her own life. She had for years. But it was a hopeless, unreturned adoration that left her unfulfilled. He'd never touched her, not even in the most innocent way. He only looked.
"I should close my door to you," she said huskily. "Refuse to speak to you, refuse to see you, and get on with my life. You're a constant torment."
Unexpectedly he reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. They smoothed down to her full, soft mouth and teased the lower lip away from the upper one. "I'm Lakota," he said quietly. "You're white."
"There is," she said unsteadily, "such a thing as birth control."
His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on hers. "And sex is all you want from me, Cecily?" he asked mockingly. "No kids, ever?"
It was the most serious conversation they'd ever had. She couldn't look away from his dark eyes. She wanted him. But she wanted children, too, eventually. Her expression told him so.
"No, Cecily," he continued gently. "Sex isn't what you want at all. And what you really want, I can't give you. We have no future together. If I marry one day, it's important to me that I marry a woman with the same backgroun ~ Diana Palmer

One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water--the boy had his right arm around the girl's shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand, and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it's so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can't do and don't dare to do, that they never know where to stop--no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other. ~ Nescio

We were never meant to be together.

Stars never aligned for us, they always
diverged our paths from each other.
Too close, but never enough.

Minute hands were never slow enough
for us to catch up, but fast enough we're
slipping from its grasp.

We were never meant to be together, but
that doesn't mean I love you any less. ~ Benita J Rosalind

I didn't mean I don't want to do it again. I just can't give you what you want. I can't give you what you deserve. What happened back there is all I know. There will never be anything more than that with me. I do not get close to people. I don't care for people," he explained, and my head began to swim with all of this information. ~ Teresa Mummert

If a close ally of Iran like Syria went to Iran and said, 'This peace is in our interest,' what do you think would they do? I can tell you they have never opposed any of our peace moves since 1991. ~ Walid Muallem

I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book. ~ Chaim Potok

Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world - the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.
It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. ~ Charles Dickens

What am I? Chopped liver? Is there some specific reason he never pulls me over close to him as we drive around the countryside? Why doesn't he hook his right arm affectionately around my neck and claim me as the woman of his pickup? I never knew I had such a yearning to ride next to a man in a pickup, but apparently it had been a suppressed lifelong dream I knew nothing about. Suddenly, sitting in that pickup with Marlboro Man, I'd apparently never wanted anything so badly in my life.
I couldn't keep quiet about it any longer. "So…," I began. Was it just a high school thing? Or worse, I imagined, is it just that I'm not and never will be a country girl? Is it that country girls have some wild sense of abandon that I wasn't born with? A reckless side, a fun, adventurous side that makes them worthy of riding next to boys in pickups? Am I untouchable? Am I too prim? Too proper? I'm not! I'm really not! I'm fun and adventurous. Reckless, too! I have a pair of jeans: Anne Kleins! And I want to be Middle Seat Worthy. Please, Marlboro Man…please. I've never wanted anything this much. "So, um…why don't you do it anymore?" I asked.
"Bucket seats," Marlboro Man answered, his hand still resting on my leg.
Made sense. I settled in and relaxed a bit. ~ Ree Drummond

The strength of the electromagnetic interaction, for example, is fixed by a number called the "fine-structure constant," a famous quantity in physics that is numerically close to 1/137. ~ Sean Carroll

When you look at the Earth from the vantage point of space, our planet looks like a little blue marble. Seeing our world from that vantage point cognitively changes you. My orbital shift happened after breaking bread with my space station crewmates and my shuttle crewmates. it showed me how close we are as countries, as races, as a species. I marveled that on Earth we have all these distances and separations and geographic boundaries, but they vanish quickly in the weightless interior of the space station. ~ Leland Melvin

Homelessness is an issue close to my heart. ~ Tyra Banks

Take a bite, but be polite! Not everyone enjoys the sight, Of food that's chewed, It looks quite crude! So close your mouth when you cheeeeew! ~ Sheri McClure-Pitler

Nicolas walked toward him. Ignoring the presence of the others nearby, he took Julien's chin in his hand and kissed him tenderly on the lips. Julien seemed chagrined at first, and then accepted the gesture. It was sweet, and had the air of a couple that had been together for a great long time.
Maric glanced away, embarrased by the intimacy, not to mention the fact that he hadn't quite realized the nature of the two warriors' relationship ealier. Not just comrades, then, and far more than close friend. The older Grey Wardens seemed unsurprised. ~ David Gaider