It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural forc… - Jonathan Safran Foer

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you. (p. 224)

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love — loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.