And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might 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.

the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.

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

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.