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.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

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.

To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.

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

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.

Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all.