“Was it possible to feel love with an empty mind? For if the mind was empty, then it was empty of love too.”

“I understand only that a vast void, an emptiness, is needing to be filled. O the things we grasp at.”

“The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment.”

“When you talk about love, and family, invariably too you are talking about compassion. This would include the notion that we are all just lumped together, and tolerance is a virtue.”

“Very quickly I begin to understand the selfishness of my love, the inappropriateness of my relationships, when I realise that every time I fuck it feels as if I am wrestling with demons.”

“Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.”

“Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.”