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.

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.