“Maybe our relationships--love--can save us, at least enough so that our lives are finally worthwhile, even with all the rotten misery and dying.”

“Our lives feel fuller when we can weave them into stories, even if not all the stories are true and even if we are just filibustering, hoping our number won’t be called--so long as we keep talking.”

“Why does the longing for love have to be so acute, like a desperate thirst? Is it because love is wanting to be saved and we can never really be saved? Maybe love is really born of our fears. Love is the heart’s desire for a painkiller; a tearful plea for a great big epidural. Yes that’s it: love is the only anesthesia that really works. And so people with broken hearts are really those who are just coming to, and if you’ve ever seen someone come out of general anesthesia, you know that it looks a lot like the beginnings of a broken heart.”

“I was glad that it rained. Not just a drizzle but big furious drops that lashed against us and danced at our feet. Our discomfort seemed somehow appropriate, all of us standing there with tears and rain washing down our taut faces, overcome by so many names.”

“We are all eccentrics in our dreams. Lunatics, even.”

“But to find it and touch it and hold it! What relief, if only briefly, until love wears off or slips through our hands. Strange how love--the most fickle of emotions--creates the illusion of permanence right from the start, just as beauty, so fleeting and elusive, can seem so timeless and infinite to behold.”

“If love doesn’t triumph, it ought to. For love is the one thing we have that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from life’s wretched absurdity. The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, it’s that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions. For love makes us feel like gods--and that’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?”