No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.

In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I'd thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.

In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.

But in my defense, I knew enough about her to know I wanted to know everything else; I knew as much about her as she wanted me to know; I knew as much about her as anyone ever knows about anyone. And isn't love just curiosity at the beginning anyway?

On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.