Ghosts, Love, Hate, Misuse, Scorn, Fury

That's pretty much what Love in the Time of Cholera is about so far. I'm a bit more than halfway through. Encountered both myself and my personal nemeses in the characters, as one should in all good literature, I think.

Here are a couple of passages that particularly choked me.

"... she attacked him without giving him time for anything else... she mounted him and took control over all of him for qll of her, absorbed in herself... where was that something in the shadows that only she knew about and longed for just for herself, until she succumbed without waiting for anybody, she fell alone into her abyss with a jubilant explosion of total victory that made the world tremble. Florentino Ariza was left ... incomplete... but with the impression of being no more than an instrument of pleasure. He would say "You treat me as if I were just anybody". She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say "Not at all: as if you were nobody." He was left with the impression that she took away everything with a mean-spirited greed, and his pride would rebel and he would leave the house determined never to return. But then he would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love of Auscenia Santander was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape. "

"The world is divided into those who screw and thsoe who do not." He distrusted those who did not: when they strayed from the straight and narrow, it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it. Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone. They felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion. They never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feigned indifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above all timid fairies... But they took pleasure in this error because this error protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members recognised each other all over the world without need of a common language..."

I'm filled with fury.