Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.