“What’s killing him is the idea that I will die unhappy, in a miserable marriage. He hates that my life isn’t ending on a good note… So I told him that he’s a good man and was the love of my life, both of which are true. I tried to tell him all the things I hadn’t told him before… Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I’d thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us.”

“What do you do when you're in love with the last man in the world you can have? You plan a life, a real life, without him.”

“My life - my real life - started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit, and, yes I know how that sounds.”

“Yes, it’s true, what I said earlier: A real life doesn’t mean geting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love.But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it’s miracle: your one tiny life’s head-on collision with divinity. ”

“He wasn’t looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. “It was like reading,” she would try to explain later, and she wasn’t talking about phonics. She didn’t break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn’t sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.”

“I don’t think love is blind, true love is probably the most clear-eyed state of being there is.’‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe with true love, you see and you love anyway…”

“We talked and talked and talked. Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears, at least in my experience. As we talked, lights flicked on inside my head; by the end of the night I was a planterium.”