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

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

Odd 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.

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.