“Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?”

“When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.”

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.”

“Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?”

“How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.”

“Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.”

“A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.”

“We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.”

“It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way.”

“How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities?”

“So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.”