Vivian

“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.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“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.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”
― Anna Quindlen, Every Last One