Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.

We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.

the lives we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.