Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it...

If you look up “charming” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?

An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. I learned that. This kind of story, this kind of things kept secrets -they...

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of...

If you don’t participate, you’re just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)

This is what I know. Don’t settle for 40, 50, or even 80 percent. A relationship-it shouldn’t be too small or too tight or even a little scratchy. It shouldn’t take up space in your...

People are secretive when they have secrets.

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.

It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you...

Sometimes you’re sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they’re only their simple, goofy selves.

I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward...

Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was.

I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn’t...

Maybe a person’s world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.

It’s shocking the things we call love.

If happiness shouldn’t make you so miserable, misery shouldn’t make you so happy.

I don’t get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days…No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance.

We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they...

Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own.

You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have the past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang,...

Those questions you have? Whether he’s the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you’re not sure whether you’re in love with someone or...

Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn’t, family that wasn’t family...

True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story....

What is it about hairdressers? You tell them ‘not too short’ and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as ‘whack the shit out of it.’ If you never say, ‘not too short,’ everything...

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It’s music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house....

The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there’s only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself.” (pg. 82)

That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.

It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don’t realize how fast this acutally happens, and it’s...

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite – that they would stay forever.

I’ve heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him...

I didn’t know what I wanted to Be…A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a...

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college...

To be devasted, or to let the truth in, finally, finally, all the way, all the way, all the way, until it fills you with its own strength, with it’s own knowledge–that love is light...

A relationship could be a place to hide too.

If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.

It starts so young, and I’m angry about that. The garbage we’re taught. About love, about what’s “romantic.” Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop...

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me....

You read all kinds of books and see all kinds of movies about the man who is obsessed and devoted, whose focus is a single solid beam, same as the lighthouse and that intense, too....

You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I’ve always thought–put together all those random pieces form everyone who’s ever known you from your parents to the...

summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air...

Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run – from danger, toward...

They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.

I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.

We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and...

You’ve got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn’t define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don’t have to struggle to be good enough for.

So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.

I kept trying to talk myself out of my second thoughts when they were trying to help me. My advice? When it comes to relationships, second thoughts should be promoted.

The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too...

More than anything, I like just being there while he works, doing what he knows to do, in his own place.