It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.

Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.

No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.

This place is too calm, too natural--too complete. I don't deserve it. At least not yet.

Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.