To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room.

The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.

Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

We are more than our bodies, it is true; but we cannot be divorced from them. They are us, and the only way in which we can see one another. Perhaps the gods are above this, but in their mercy, they have given us the guise of bodies.

The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night's sleep.