Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.