A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way.

Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move.

How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities?

We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.""Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?