Joan Wickersham quotes:

A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork.

A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors."I will refute them with new works," he said.It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today. (172)"

There is also something deeply lovely about uncertainty: the possibility of optimism.

And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the slow absorption of a bruise.

[On suicide:] It's the only cause of death that can be used as a noun to describe the dead person. If you die of cancer you are not called 'a cancer.' If someone else shoots you, you are not referred to as 'a murder.' But if you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide. Your death becomes your definition.

But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like "similar"?

The word "miss" is so wistful. As is the word "wistful," for that matter. They both have sighs embedded in them, that "iss" sound. Which also sounds like if.