John Dufresne Quotes

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I’ve loved her ever since.

She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

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

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

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.