Things get better--hurt less--over time. If you let them.

In some cases, she was actively trying not to make friends, though she usually stopped short of being rude. (Uptight, tense, and mildly misanthropic? Yes. Rude? No.)

He wished that they could go through life like this. That he could physically put himself between Eleanor and the world.

I think I can live without you, but it won't be any kind of life.

It was like their lives were overlapping lines, like they had their own gravity. Usually, that serendipity thing felt like the nicest thing the universe had ever done for her.

There's never been a moment,' he barely said, 'when I didn't recognize you.' She wiped her eyes. Her mascara smeared. He nudged the merry-to-round into motion. He could kiss her now. If he wanted. 'I'd know you in the dark,' he said. 'From a thousand miles away. There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with.' He could kiss her. 'I know you,' he said.

Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?