Reading reassures us that no matter how alone we might feel, there are many others - spread as wide as history itself - who have felt the same way we have, who have occupied the rooms we find ourselves locked in at various points of our lives.

If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.

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.

Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.

But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them?...How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?

For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.

It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.