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.

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

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

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

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.

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