Teach your heart that this is destiny

To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

Change is all about motion, motion is all about uncertainty and we are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?

We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.

every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimatesecrets of your marriage.