The Great Believers

e said, “If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”

But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?

Whatever bond had been forced upon Fiona and Cecily in Yale’s hospital room didn’t have lasting power; trauma wasn’t always the best glue

And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.

Asher said, “Does it really ever go anywhere?”
“Does what?”
“Love. Does it vanish?”
Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself steady whenever Asher braked suddenly. “I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn’t it?”
Asher said, “I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”

What had been so special about him? Fiona didn’t know what she’d expected, but something more than this. Ranko Novak was worth seventy years of devotion. Ranko Novak was irreplaceable, a hole at the center of Nora’s universe. And this was it? A face, two eyes, two ears.
Well, try telling that to someone in love.

Time travel is so easy! It’s devastatingly easy! All you have to do is live long enough!”

Well, if you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie.

The man looked a good deal older than the woman, although what French woman between fifteen and fifty didn’t look twenty-six?

“It’s funny,” Richard said, “when I was your age, I assumed it would all be downhill after fifty. Well. Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?”