“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

“Best Friends. And I thought of what she had done all the millions of times I cried to her, collapsing at even the slightest wounding of my heart or pride. So I reached over and pulled her to me, wrapping my arms around her, and held my best friend close, returning so many favors all at once....”

“How could I relax when I had to welcome Christian into my home, the one who had wounded me deeper than anyone, the one who haunted my days and held me in my dreams?”

“Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.”

“This place reminds me of the time I had amnesia. I think. It also reminds me of being in love. That must mean I’m lost.”

“Absence with the conviction probably of her indifference, had produced this very natural and desirable effect.”