Why is love intensified by absence?

When somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense?

Henry loves my hair almost as though it is a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back.

How does it feel? I feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home. When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson