The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.

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

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

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

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.

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

The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.