Autumn can be glorious but menacing too – the long shadows, brisk winds, scurrying leaves, impending frost.

What he understands is that life has suffering in it, can’t not have suffering in it, because in life there is everything.

Places where life once flowed, having lost their blood supply, became dead spots in her psychic tissue, succumbed to a form of necrosis that also invaded the thing that was neither her nor him but the ground between them, the relationship itself.

You make your choices when you’re far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows.

She’s aware of her fondness for ledger keeping, a term that marriage counselors use to castigate their clients for keeping a running tally of who did what to whom, which is not in the spirit of generosity that supposedly nurtures a healthy relationship.

She likes things orderly and predictable and feels secure when her time is mapped out well in advance.

At times he swears that he’s going to go straight, but mostly he feels like a drowning man in love with the surf.

People live their lives, express themselves, and pursue fulfillment in their own ways and in their own time. They are going to make mistakes, exercise poor judgment and bad timing, take wrong turns, develop hurtful habits, and go off on tangents.

According to Adler, having a good measure of self-esteem leaves us free to be task oriented rather than worth oriented in all that we undertake, whereas feelings of inferiority keep us focused on ourselves.

There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she’s given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take.