Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony; in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedrooms fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don't know then. But later you realize - that was the moment.

I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.

I read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.