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.

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.

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

Odd how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love-soaked, drenched in love-only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined.

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

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.

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