unrequited

"o maiden!" said the priest. "take pity on me! you think you are miserable. alas! you do not know what misery is. it is to love a woman -to be a priest -to be hated -to love with all the force of your soul -to feel that you would give for the least of her smiles your blood, your life, your character, your salvation, immortality and eternity, this world and the next -to regret that you are not a king, a genie, an emperor, an archangel, a god, so that you could cast a greater slave at her feet. to clasp her night and day in your dreams and in your thoughts -to see her in love with a soldier's uniform, and to have nothing to offer her but the wretched cassock, which is to her an object of fear and disgust. to be present, with a heart bursting with jealousy and rage, while she lavishes on an idiotic braggart the treasures of love and beauty. to see the body that burns you, the sweet breasts, that tender flesh palpitate and blush under another's kisses! oh heaven! to love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to think of her blue veins, of her brown skin until you spend entire nights writhing on the floor of your cell, and to see all the caresses you have been saving up for her lead to her torture! to have succeeded only in laying her on the leather bed! oh, these are pincers heated in the fire of hell! happy in comparison is he who is sawed apart between two planks, or quartered by horses! do you know what agony it is when, during the long nights, your arteries boil, your heart is breaking, your head splitting, and your teeth tear your own flesh! thoughts of love, jealousy, and despair are pitiless tormentors, and they turned me pitilessly on a red hot spit! girl, have mercy! stop for a moment! a bit of ash on that fire! wipe, i beg you, the sweat pouring off my brow in great drops! torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! have pity, girl! have pity on me."

-victor hugo the hunchback of notre-dame