love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.