“I understood it-until you tried to explain it.”

“I am no good without you, Ginesse,” he said. “I spent a lifetime alone, but I never understood loneliness until I was away from you. I never understood happiness until I saw you again.”

“I realized that I could never really function fully on this earth until I understood this: Until you know WHOSE you are, you will never know WHO you are.”

“I never understood until recently that it's possible to miss what you never had.”

“I'm in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn't that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn't that the simple magic phrase?”

“Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.”