Though love might never be painless and was certainly not wise, neither could it be forgotten. It was as inevitable as it was unreasonable—and its unreason was unfortunately no argument against it.

Immature love (which has little to do with age), on the other hand, is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea,

While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.

I listened to requests of “more” and “harder” from next door, and I grew drunk on the liquor of grief.

When you’ve been in love, it is not the length of time that matters, it’s everything you’ve felt and done coming out intensified. To me, it’s one of the few times when life isn’t elsewhere.

Romantic terrorism is a demand that negates itself in the process of its resolution, and brings the terrorist up against an uncomfortable reality—that love’s death cannot be arrested.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

Happiness with other people seems bounded by two kinds of excess: suffocation and loneliness.