The Secret Lives of People in Love

I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.

I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do in life.

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.

I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.

I think we keep these moments of rejection and acceptance very close. I think we carry them always, like cracked shells from which a part of us once hatched.

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

It had rained, she said, and I imagined the beads of small water on the windshield like a thousand eyes, or each drop a small imperfect reflection of a perfect moment.

I didn’t know who she was, but I had this fire inside me for someone I knew existed.

When it rains, even the most insignificant puddle is a map of the universe.

There is little joy in those first moments of recognition- for the reality is that most encounters of such depth, most first glances of love come to nothing. And while the sincerity of that rare moment when your heart is bursting should be the signal to fling yourself on the ground in the path of this stranger, it's the depth of such sincerity that paralyses you, holds you back from the silence of phrases like "hello" and "good morning." And as they pass, granting only single, torturous details like fingers upon the handle of an umbrella, or a hair pin bearing the weight of a twist, or a wool collar beaded with pearls of rain- there is only one thing you could ever say that would be true, that would make them stop walking and turn to face you. But such a thing is unsayable.

We had spent only a few weeks together, five years ago, but when you finally meet the person who in daydreams you had sculpted without words, the transparency of time becomes the color of hair, and shapeless years become the shape of lips.

Perhaps we were each allotted only a certain amount of love - enough for only an initial meeting - a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being.

When somebody leaves this plane—or, if you like, goes into another room—those left behind sometimes try and stop loving—but this is a mistake, because even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.

She once told me that she loved me because I was the only thing she could hear. She can feel the vibration of the strings through the carved vessel of her instrument, but I am inside her. I am a song soaked into each bone of her secret body where the world has not been able to wander.

Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible

Life just swallows you up, doesn't it?Just swallows you up with its everyday things

There are some lies that, under the right circumstances, are the only truth

It's tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.

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.

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.

She told me that while my father’s body might be crushed under tons of black earth, the body is nothing but camouflage. She whispered that every soul is a river trying to find its way back to the sea.

She once told me how she could feel the missing part of her arm- how she sometimes experienced the sensation of a hand- that it is possible to feel something without its physical presence. Perhaps love is like this and we are all limbs of one giant intangible body.

That night she admitted her compulsion to escape. She was worried that if my father drowned, or I disappeared, she would be left with nothing. By running away at least she would have the joy of knowing she was missed.

But sometimes, when confronted by something of unfathomable beauty, the bars of the cage around us begin to tremble. So I ran away to protect myself and remained a prisoner.

In that moment of recognition he is not consumed by a rushing sensation of love-quite simply a door opens to a room that has never gone away. The years apart were just years without one another.

The key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth

You may wonder why I haven’t killed myself because living with madness or watching it flood the heart of someone we love is unbearable.

As an archaeologist, I’ve often wondered how we as a race keep going through all the misery. The answer is revealed: the potential for closeness with strangers. Floating

He still is a little boy waiting for someone to love him.