Everyone I knew hated Monday mornings, but I never minded them.
But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with him? To help him through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?
It was an odd sensation, having to view my family as human beings.
It had been years before she could view anybody else’s happiness without mourning the loss of her own.
It’s always the kindnesses that finish you off.
With Will I had never had to consider what I said; talking to him was as effortless as breathing. Now I was good at not really saying anything about myself at all.
She couldn’t believe losing someone you had known such a short time could feel like losing part of yourself, that it could make food taste wrong and colors seem dull.
You and I. We are both immigrants. We both know it is hard to find your place in this world. You want to make your life better, work hard in country that is not your own – you make new life, new friends, find new love. You get to become new person! But is never a simple thing, never without cost.
I think she loves me. But she loves herself more. Or how could she do what she does?
I saw that pretty much everyone bore the brutal imprint of love, whether it was lost, whipped away from them, or simply vanished into a grave.
And yet. To commit to Sam was to commit to the likelihood of more loss.
I don’t know what I think. All I know is that most of the time, I would rather be with him that anyone else I know.
She has several imaginary conversations with him and two imaginary arguments.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a.
I’m not letting go of you.
He will be out there, living his life to the full, when she seems to have put hers perennially on hold.
Across Manhattan the sun glowed orange, the endless sea of glittering skyscrapers reflecting back a peach light, the centre of the world, going about its business. A million lives below me, a million heartbreaks big and small, tales of joy and loss and survival, a million little victories every day.
It’s almost impossible to feel crap after eating a really great spaghetti bolognese.
He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.
I don’t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else’s, to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.