- Alice sensed that young children instinctively preferred the life inside a small house to a big one.
- Sometimes you couldn't face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.
- He had always loved her, even when he was mean to her. He remembered it, and he had been told so. He'd loved her before she even realized it. Wasn't that the easiest way to love a person?
- She knew the fear of being left behind. But she was also afraid of getting ahead.
- "Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile."
- When you learned things young, you just stuck them into your haphazard pile of life and went along.
- But sometimes what you knew made no difference to what you did.
- In some sense, she was never really anywhere. She was happiest, Paul suspected, in transit, where the past was untouchable and the present negligible. And she would be, he guessed, for as long as she kept believing that the future would be better.
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- There was one thought, and it tangled him up like a repetitive, half-awake anxiety dream. Could love be continuous? Could you carry it unbroken from childhood to adulthood, wrestling it over the crags and pitfalls of adolescence? Could it come out the other side as the same kind of love, just expressed in new ways? Or where those two kinds of love disjunctive and creepily at odds?
- Maybe it wasn't simply the answer that was baffling. Maybe the question was wrong. Maybe there weren't two kinds of love. Maybe there were a trillion kinds. Or just one.
- The chief frustration of romantic love was that you couldn't make it go by yourself.
- Healing wasn't always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.
- How did you stop loving someone? It was one of the world's more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.
- There was love expressed in the places you usually forgot to look.
- So often you wanted to want things but you did not want to get them. You wanted the deficiency but not the cure.
- You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn't decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made such a mess of the place.
- Hardship made you stronger, maybe, but it didn't appear to make you any happier.
- Sometimes sheer vastness was terrifying. The volume of the universe hanging above them. The mystery of the ocean connecting you to places cold and deep. The infinite nature of time before this beach and the restless eternity that stretched on after.
oct 29 2013 ∞
oct 31 2013 +
oct 31 2013 +