Genius (2016) Thomas Wolfe quotation
As Eugene's eyes became accustomed to the haze of the cigarettes and cigars swirling miasma-like, he saw a woman, in serge and gloves that crept like living tendrils up her normally ivory arms, but now sun-kissed as a blush as the incarnadine discovery inside a conch shell seen for the first time by a bewildered zoologist as he is undone by its rosy, promising pinkness. Those were her arms.
But it was her eyes that stopped his breath and made his heart leap up. Blue they were. Even through the swirling vapors of pompous chesterfields and arrogant lucky strikes, he saw her eyes were a blue beyond blue, like the ocean. Blue beyond blue. A blue he could swim into forever and never miss a fire-engine red or a cornstalk yellow. Across the chasm of that room, that blue, those eyes devoured him and looked past him and never saw him and never would, of that he was sure.
From that moment, Eugene understood what the poets had been writing about these many years. All the lost, wandering, lonely souls who were now his brothers. He knew a love that would never be his. So quickly did he fall for her that no one in the room even heard the sound. The whoosh as he fell, the clatter of his broken heart. It was a sure silence but his life was shattered.
But it was her eyes that stopped his breath and made his heart leap up. Blue they were. Even through the swirling vapors of pompous chesterfields and arrogant lucky strikes, he saw her eyes were a blue beyond blue, like the ocean. Blue beyond blue. A blue he could swim into forever and never miss a fire-engine red or a cornstalk yellow. Across the chasm of that room, that blue, those eyes devoured him and looked past him and never saw him and never would, of that he was sure.
From that moment, Eugene understood what the poets had been writing about these many years. All the lost, wandering, lonely souls who were now his brothers. He knew a love that would never be his. So quickly did he fall for her that no one in the room even heard the sound. The whoosh as he fell, the clatter of his broken heart. It was a sure silence but his life was shattered.