He was powerful and I died of love in his shadow.

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while Just for a few months of ones life is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it Or to nap in a garden in a patch of sunlight in the middle of the day right next to your favourite fountain And then to do it again the next day

Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebodyreally want himit is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.

If I love you I will carry for you all your pain I will assume for you all your debts in every definition of the word I will protect you from your own insecurity I will protect upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain and if they are not available I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

I met an old lady once almost a hundred years old and she told me There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over all through history. How much do you love me And Whos in charge

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone elses body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there buried somewhere deep behind the sternum or it is not. When it isnt there as I have learned in the past with heartbreaking clarity you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patients body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question Do you want your belly pressed against this persons belly forever --or not

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

In desperate love we always invent the characters of our partners demanding they be what we need of them and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each others personalities. Who wouldnt Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But thats not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this Can you accept the flaws Can you look at your partners faults honestly and say I can work around that. I can make something out of it. Because the good stuff is always going to be there and its always going to pretty and sparkly but the crap underneath can ruin you.