I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.

Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.

Accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness.

I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.

The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.

Will I ever stop being surprised by the ways people make hell?

Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.

He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.

But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?

It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.

She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

I don’t know why it’s not universally acknowledged that looking back is a terrible idea. It only makes going forward that much harder.

...that tender compunction of the honest-minded, so different from the hateful intoxication of criminals...

By dint of waiting, he hoped his heart would wear out and stop beating. What other way was there to stop loving someone?

The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.

Human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

I grew up kissing books and bread.

Never opt for change simply to leave something you don't like. Change works best when you go toward something, even if it is the unknown.

In nature's infinite book of secrecy A little I can read.