Quotes in italics appear in the book, but are attributed to someone other than the author.

"Sometimes I'm blamed for being too open, too forward, and then for being too guarded and withdrawn." (10)

"It's just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can't have. It's those we lost or who we never knew who leave their mark. The others barely echo." (11)

"Some of us never jumped to the next level. We lost track of where we were headed and as a result stayed where we started." (20)

"Aren't those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we've given up hoping they could." (21)

"I can't stand being by myself yet I can't wait to be alone." (22)

"Knowing the end is near is one thing... but believing it is quite another." (41)

"We all have ways of putting up screens to keep life at bay." (43)

"... a paradox is never an answer, it's just a fractured truth... " (51)

"... some people may be brokenhearted not because they've been hurt but because they've never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them." (54-55)

"... part of me probably hasn't given up wanting to turn back the clock. Or hasn't quite accepted that I've moved on— if I indeed moved on. Perhaps all I truly want is to reconnect with the person I used to be and lost track of and simply turned my back on once I moved elsewhere. I may never want to be who I was in those days, but I do want to see him again, just for a minute or so to find out who this person is..." (62)

"Everything in my life was merely prologue until now... " —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (82)

"Love is easy... it's the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both." (113)

"... I never really let go or lose myself with others. After an instant of passion, I always fall back to being the autonomous me." (141)

"... when we feared we weren't [thinking along the same lines] or felt we were wrong-footing each other, it was simply because we had learned not to trust that anyone could possibly think and behave the way we did... "  (147)

"What good is the map is the end's already known?

What good is the landfall if the boat stalls?

What good is the key if the door is wide open?" (154)

"... I'd lost my soul for so long and was now finding I'd owned it all along but didn't know where to look for it or how to find it..." (157)

"... our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper than we thought." (183)

"Then maybe when you get to my age and the dearth of things life has to offer becomes more evident by the day, maybe then you can start noticing those tiny accidents that turn out to be miracles and that can redefine our lives and cast an incandescent luster over things that, in the great scheme of things, could easily be meaningless." (197)

"... the young teenager still lingers inside me, and occasionally utters a few words, then ducks and goes into hiding. Because he's afraid of asking, because he thinks you'll laugh that he asked, because even trusting is difficult." (206)

"You die and then no one speaks of you, and before you know it, no one asks, no one tells, no one even knows or wants to know. You're extinct, you never lived, never loved. Time never casts shadows and memory doesn't drop ashes." (208)

"You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn't deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is unlimited: at some point the cards repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn't always respect what we believe is the end of a life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, by the time we learn to live, it's already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What would be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough." (210-211)

"So much time had passed, so many years, and who knew how many of them might turn out to have been wasted years, that unbeknownst to us, ended up making us better people." (254)

"So much time, so many years, and all the lives we'd touched and left behind, as though they could just as easily have never happened, though happen they did— time... is always the price we pay for the unlived life." (254)