Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.

Also I could hear Amanda's voice: Why are you being so weak? Love's never a fair trade. So Jimmy's tired of you, so what, there's guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they're wilted. But you have to act like you're having a spectacular time and every day's a party.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.

your kiss no longer literature but fine print, a set of instructions.

Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.

God gives us love! Something to love He lends us; but when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone: This is the curse of time.

Love finds a way.