Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.' If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?' Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.