The Course of Love: A Novel

The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.

He senses the psychological and moral role of wine, its capacity to open up channels of feeling and communication which are otherwise closed off—not merely to offer a crude escape from difficulties, but to allow access to emotions which daily life unfairly leaves no room for.

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculous

We speak of “love” as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former.

Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence.

When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were—and we did likewise. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

Pronouncing a lover “perfect” can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

He is just a fortuitous constellation of atoms which have chosen to resist entropy for a few moments within cosmic eternity.