I understood all that in my head, but I still didn‟t believe it in my heart.

I might have been eleven years old and a little socially immature, but I recognized a gauntlet being thrown down when I saw it, and I had no choice but to take it up.

I’ve been feeling something else. Like I’m about to be sucked into something powerful and painful.

Willem, I suspect deep down you know exactly why you're here, exactly what you want, but you're unwilling to the wanting, let alone the having. Because both of those propositions are terrifying.

Even if you find him. Even if he didn't leave you on purpose, he can't possibly live up to the person you've built him into." It's not like the thought hasn't occurred to me. I get that the chances of finding him are small, but the chances of finding him as I remember him are even smaller. But I just keep going back to what my dad always says, about how when you lose something, you have to visualize the last place you had it. And I found―and then lost―so many things in Paris.

For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.