Odd, she thought, 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. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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