A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to … - Michael Cunningham

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”

She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.

“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.'
'You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all.'
'But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.