The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

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.

I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.

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.

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.

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.