College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

The zipper opened all the way down our spines.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.