lost at sea.

"He turned to her one night in bed and said, 'Millie, you're fifty-one. You don't have to have a career. Really, you don't,' and she put her hands to her face and wept."

"But then you had to leave. And in your packing and going, in tearing the seams, the hems, the haws, you felt like some ba dcombination of Odysseus and Penelope. You felt funny in the heart."

"There were people in the world who were good at love and people who were bad at it. She was bad. She used to think she was good at love, that it was intimacy she was bad at. But you had to have both. Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, 'Listen to this!' but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap. It reminded her of a dinner party she had gone to once, where dessert was served on plates printed with French songs. After dinner everyone had had to sing their plate, but hers had stil had whipped cream on it, and when it came her turn, she had garbled the notes and words, frantically pushing the whipped cream around with a fork so she could see the next measure. Oh, she was bad, bad like that, at love."

"Dennis' ex-wife had fallen in love with a man she said was like out of a book. Dennis forgot to ask what book. He was depressed and barely dating. 'I should have said to her, 'Yeah, and what book?'"

"People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane."

"What all to love in the world, went a prayer from her childhood. What all to love?
The lumber of his bones piled close."

"Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing-the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought."

These are some quotes I will not have the time or patience to write in my quote book before I have to return it to the library at school. They are all by Lorrie Moore, who breaks my heart but not as much, as I learned tonight, as three short lines by Richard Brautigan.