Melissa Bank

“It was the opposite of love, and yet it wasn't love I was opposed to but the murmurs that said, This is your chance, which seemed less like the promise of a door opening than the threat of one sealing shut.”

“She seems sort of lost.'I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.”

“You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had.I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson."Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.”

“He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.”

“Dante's definition of hell: proximity without intimacy. From the Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing”

“We are all children until our fathers die.”

“I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.”

“You don't need a reason to forgive... If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do. ”

“Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it. ”