A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

It was probably good you couldn't flip the love switch because sometimes it was what you needed even if you didn't want it.

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to

Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.

Sometimes it is a relief to be invisible