“You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.”
“She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.”
“Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.”
“Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.”
“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”
“You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.”
“I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see if what you're saying is what you wanted to be saying.”
“Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.”
“You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life.”
“It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.”
“Every person in therapy has a love disorder.”
“A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?”
“Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.”
“Think of it like you’re holding a bird in your hand,” Peter said. “If you hold it too tightly, you’ll strangle it. Too loosely, and it’ll fly away.”
“He looked at her in surprise as she pushed him back, her hand on his chest. Prurient and tender and shy and slutty, she tasted him, and savored the mouthfeel of him, and it was as if they had been lovers since forever. There was never a thought of Sparrow School, or numbered techniques. Dominika simply wanted him.”
“I had come to realize that it is possible for someone to go too far to be forgiven. The best you could do was walk away and pray they didn’t try to follow you.”
“Boston was a hard city sometimes. The winters were hell, but the people here were strong, passionate, and often painfully direct.”
“Do you know what it is to be really intimate, to feel safe with someone who will never betray you, will never force you to act unlike yourself? That was what we had.”
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