Do you love me?" he asked. I fell silent. "For the rest of it is glitter and noise," he said. "At the heart of it all is love. You make that choice, and you go forward from there.

I thought it would not hurt to remind you that love is a powerful force in this world, invisible though it seems.

Everybody's afraid of love, because love is what hurts the most.

For the world slows and the stars falter, and all that remains is you.

Manufactured--synthetic--even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be--I would love you.

I've remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they're actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It's the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

Love is a popular romantic notion that leads to nothing but its own brand of misery.