“Is it needy? It's not. We don't need each other. We just really, really enjoy each other. And we're good together. We're good people together. And I have the funniest feeling. I can really, truly touch this all, this happiness and the sadness too, I can trace all of it with my fingers. It isn't theoretical or distant. This feels like me. This is me. I love him, and, for the first time in a relationship, I also like me. Every time he says "I love you," I answer, "I believe you.”

“It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.”

“No one knows we're there, no one sees us. We never leave the room. I think about the secret voice you use when you make love. No one but that person will ever hear it. And here, we listen to each other, but we lock it in with touch, and the room vacuum seals it to stay fresh until we can breathe together again. When he breaks the silence it is to say, "I want you to know that, when you get pregnant, nothing is going to change except your dress size.”

“It's like he has emotional amnesia... I think you have to accept that the person you knew isn't there at the moment. I was witness to how much he loved you. I have the photos. This isn't the person we knew. I don't recognize this person. He's shed his skin." Her heart is broken too. She has to say the thing that will give me back my life. She draws on every reserve. I see how much it hurts her and it hurts me too. I came from her joy and her pain, I lived in it and I live in it now.”

“I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them, but that I had them.”

“It took a long time, but my heart now feels full when I think of him. When you fall in love again—which I have—it's funny the other things that come back in with that open-ness. You have this ghost chorus of the lovers who came before, but they're benign now, they're good spirits.”

“I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.”