I wish I had the power to flip my reality upside down like an hourglass, and that life wasn't a finite affair, but rather a perpetually recurring passage through a hole in time.

Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right. Perhaps the wise spurn one to remain safe from the other, but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without.

Janice used to say that instinct was reason in a hurry; I was not so sure about the reason part.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.

While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.

If you let go of me now,” I whispered, stretching against him, “it could be another six hundred years before you find me again. Are you willing to take that risk?