It wasn’t that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of...

You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they’re normal to you because you’ve been dealing with them all your life.

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed...

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

I loved her for what I couldn’t understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.

She knows what it’s like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I’ve loved her ever since.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don’t even know it.

Every person in therapy has a love disorder.