But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?

In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work.

you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

We alter and customize the thing every century, every generation, every day - both in the courts and in our own homes. And marriage accepts our modifications gracefully. Marriage adapts, evolves and (in a manner that I find miraculous and kind of inspiring) somehow keeps chugging along.

he was still my romantic hero and I was still his living dream

It's not enough for me to just hear about something or read about something, I wanna know it in my bones.

Childlessness doesn't make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish.