There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we're all your family.' "She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. 'You still have a family,' she whispers.

She left for Juilliard the day after Labor Day. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me good-bye. She told me that she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security. She never came back.

Girlfriend is such a stupid word. I couldn't stand calling her that. So, we had to get married, so I could call her 'wife.

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.

Accidents. It's all about the accidents.

You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.

Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.” “If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.