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

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.

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

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.

I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.

love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.