It isn't just that you fall in love with someone — you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you… - Alexander Chee

The life I led now I’d made so I would never be her again. I’d never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer — underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

Their whole difficult lives seemed not to weigh on them at all. Taken as mornings and meals, suppers and evenings, all of the world could be carried, both the sad and the delicious, their lives seemed to say.