“Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete-like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.”

“There was something striking about a single key. It was like a question waiting to be answered, a whole missing a half. Useless on its own, needing something else to be truly defined.”

“Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it.”

“Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so damned hard.”

“Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.”

“But this, too, wasn’t true. Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so dammed hard.”

“Not for the first time, I wished both of us could just say what we meant. But that, like so much else, was impossible”