“Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.”

“And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.”

“The weight of his losses finally too much to bear.But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.”

“Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?”

“The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.”

“To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.”

“Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.”