John Dufresne

“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”

“A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.”

“You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.”

“It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.”

“We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.”

“A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?”