There’s a word for your impulse, Louise. Cacoëthes, I said to her. The urge to do something somewhat wrong. Not something unspeakable or horrific. Ju… - Louise Erdrich

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.