“A Mixed-breed Apple"A little mixed-breed apple,half red, half yellow, tells this story.A lover and beloved get separated.Their being apart was one thing,but they have opposite responses.The lover feels pain and grows pale.The beloved flushes and feels proud.I am a thorn next to my master's rose.We seem to be two, but we are not.”

“Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend out lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished.”

“There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.”

“Love and the lover have no rigid doctrine. Whichever direction the lover takes, he turns toward his beloved. Wherever he may be, he is with his beloved. Wherever he goes, he goes with his beloved. He cannot do anything, cannot survive for even one moment, without his beloved. He constantly recalls his beloved, and his beloved remembers him. Lover and beloved, rememberer and remembered, are ever in each other’s company, always together.”

“The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.”

“Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city”