[...]by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they might ever die.

I wanted to scream. When I'm with you, I feel I can take what others call my life and turns its face away from the wall. My entire life faces the wall except when I'm with you. I stare at my life and want to undo every mistake, every deceit, turn a new leaf, turn the table, turn the clock. I want to put a real face on my life, not the drab front I've been wearing since forever. So why can't I speak to you now?

But no one can prepare for the worst. The worst doesn't only dash hopes; it tears through everything in ways that are almost meant to hurt, to punish, to shame. Despite my most sobering forecasts, life can still play the cruelest card and scuttle everything—and just when I thought we were sailing past the shoals.

If I had a tumor, then I'd be dead before the year was out, and if I were dead, then there'd be nothing left, no second chances, no leap-year parties, and this waiting for the right time would have been for nothing. I will have died having lived the wrong life. No, not lived: waited.

I thought for a few seconds. “I can’t think of a wish.”“Some life,” she said, meaning either that my life was so enviably put together that there was nothing left to wish for—or that it was so hopelessly bereft of joy that wishing something was a luxury no longer worth considering.

. . . love, which happens only once in life, and thereafter is never quite spontaneous or impulsive.

Death, contrary to what everyone tells you, is not a part of life