The years passed so quickly I had to search videos and photo albums for proof of our shared life. It happened. It must have. We did all that living. And yet it required evidence, or belief.

I didn't love the love. Because it was overwhelming. Because it was necessarily cruel. Because it couldn't fint into my body, and so deformed itself into a kind of agonizing hypervigilance that complicated what should have been the most uncomplicated of things [...] Because it was too much love for happiness.

It's easy to be close, but almost impossible to stay close. Think about friends. Think about hobbies. Even ideas. They're close to us - sometimes so close we think they are part of us - and then, at some point, they aren't close anymore. They go away. Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don't wreste we let go of. Love isn't the absence of struggle. Love is struggle

How to play sadness: It doesn't exist, so hide it like a tumor.

Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go off.

Things can be for the best and the worst at the same time.

It was scary how quickly and completely his past could be rewritten or overwritten. All those years felt worthwhile while they were happening, but only a few months on the other side of them and they were a gigantic waste of time. Of a life.

But I'm not mourning. I'm accusing them, Why did you? They chose it, they had control over their death, they decided it was time to leave and they left, they set up this barrier. They didn't consider how I would feel, who would take care of me. I'm furious because they let it happen.

They're avoiding me, they find me inappropriate, they think I should be filled with death, I should be in mourning.

A faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now.

He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do.

The Eskimoes had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love

If it had happened to me I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised from the dead like that; I would have returned with secrets, I would have known things most people didn't.

When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict

Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into evensized lenghts, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

All of the dead are in the hands of the living

She's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets

Nostalgia for him seizes her by the throat

Hope was the worst. As long as she had hope, how was she supposed to get on with her life?