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And then she'd smile wide and hold out her arms, and say, 'If I knew you were going to be this beautiful, I never would have let you go.'

Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes is takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes is takes the shape of love.

Life is precious, Jacob thought. It is the most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most dificult to remember to have

You're afraid that letting anything out will leave you open to letting things in.

Without love, you die. With love, you also die. Not all deaths are equal.

They were singing, and I knew the song, but not how to join them.

You want to belive that your work should have the significance of a war, that a long marriage should offer the same kind of excitement as a first date

There are only two kinds of Jews of his generation: those who perished and those who survived. We swore our allengiance to the victims, were good on our promise never to forget them. But we turned our backs on those who endured, and forgot them. All our love was for the dead.

The absence of the expression of pain is not the absence of pain

"I wanted to tell you whatever is the genuine version of I am sorry for your loss."
"I don't belive in genuine versions."
"I wish you less sadness, How about that?"

Silence can be as irrepressible as laughter. And it can accumulate, like weightless snowflakes. It can collapse a ceiling.

There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts the most. There is only the medicine of beliving each other's pain, and being present for it

"I'm sorry I hurt you"
"Why did you do it?"
"Because it was a cowardly way to hurt myself"

"You're lonely, and I look like a Band-Aid."

Most people behave badly when wounded. If you can remember the wounds, it is far more possible to forgive the behavior

At times, it was almost impossible to cross the distance between their bodies, to reach out.

The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: "Are we there yet?" Adults: "How did we get here so quickly?

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