The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.

If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.

I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.

In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.

Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

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