“The human being is designed for many things. Loneliness is not one of them. We are not meant to go through this life alone.”

“Now the uncle spoke up. 'This cannot be,' he said. 'The human being is designed for many things. Loneliness is not one of them.' ... Mrs. Ramani leaned into me, and said, as a statement of fact. 'We are not meant to go through this life alone.”

“Our time is so precious. You're holding out for someone who you really want to spend all your time with. Otherwise, there's no point to it.”

“Of course he went straight for the psycho defense. Men always like to go straight to the psycho defense. For that reason alone we should never go psycho on a guy: just so we'll never be proving them right.”

“I had ways of consoling myself. Yes, there was food but there was beyond food, this idea I had of an oversoul of loneliness. A connectedness among the world's lonely that I could turn to when I was very low. There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.”

“I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them. This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her life meant, what she meant by the life she led. Then she will be alive, somehow, and her wish for me will have come true. My vow is to learn more about her. To see her as she saw herself.”

“So I knew this wasn't going to be one of those things where I liked a guy and then this awful girl liked him, and I got the guy because I was so wholesome and right and good. This was real life. In real life, I had to get a serious grip.”