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

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

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.

— John Dufresne

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. Furthermore, I know this is not love, of course. What it is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.

— John Dufresne

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

— John Dufresne

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.

— John Dufresne

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.

— John Dufresne

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.

— John Dufresne