The act of love is always a confession, Camus wrote. But so is the quiet closing of a door. A cry in the night. A fall down the stairs. A cough in the hall. All my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin. Imagine myself into her loss. Trying and failing. Only perhaps—how can I say this—perhaps I wanted to fail. Because it kept me going. My love for her was a failure of the imagination.

The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say. But it isn’t really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host.

There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.

How little I understood of him then, of how the more you hide the more it becomes necessary to withdraw, how soon enough it becomes impossible to live among others.

I was overwhelmed by two feelings: one, the regret that nothing ever stays the same, and two, the sense that the burden I labored under had now gotten immeasurably heavier.

In the worst moments I only needed to pull myself beneath the surface, to dive down and touch the place within where this mysterious giftedness lived in me, and so long as I found it I knew that one day I would escape their world and make my life in another.

Terrible things befall people, but not all are destroyed. Why is it that the same thing that destroys one does not destroy another?

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of drawing a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. and though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.

What they did, they did without compromise, free of the complications imposed on the rest of us by indecision, wavering, regret.