To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

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.

I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.

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