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Thank you mellyjelly/drumthings for this fantabulous skin=D

I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. (Vladimer Nabokov)

But a witness is defined through what he sees, not what he says, And just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains, and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart, and the battered paperback you revisit every April, because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.

Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.

You think you know the world you are living in. If you can feel it, and touch it, and smell it, and taste it, then it must be so. You tell yourself that you would bet your life on the simple fact that the sky is blue. And then one day someone comes along and informs you empathetically that you're wrong. Blue, you insist. Blue as the ocean. Blue as a whale. Blue as my daughter's eyes. But that person shakes his head, and everyone else backs him up. You poor girl, they say. All of those things - the ocean, the whale, her eyes - they're green. You've gotten them mixed up. You've had it wrong all along.

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

We are all miracles. What were the odds against a life? Any life? All of our lives? When you thought of all the untold billions of sperm that fell on the stony ground, and the eggs beyond number that were destined to make their lonely journey unfertilised, and the virtual impossibility of any sperm and any egg ever meeting, it was a wonder that anyone ever got born at all. Every last one of us is a walking miracle.

We agree what it takes to get you. But what does it take to keep you? The baby. And the love for the baby - this big love, the biggest, the love of your life. You can't imagine how big that love is, you can't guess at the love inside you that pours out when you have a child. That's why you stay. It's so easy to walk away when there's no baby. You just go. There's no anchor, no ball and chain. But then there's a baby and it's impossible.

Paulo believed in romance. He believed that love could last a lifetime. He still believed that he could have it all with Jessica. He believed in Jessica and himself as a couple, despite all that aching longing for something they had never had, despite the sadness, and the secret tears behind closed doors, and the hurt that chewed them up alive when his mother yet again smiled and yet again asked them when they were going to start a family - as though the pair of them were currently just a cheap impersonation of a family.

You can love a baby without even knowing her. But not an adult. You can't love an adult without knowing them, can you? You can't even like them very much.

How much can you give up for the person you love, and still keep loving them?

This is the best thing in the world. But he didn't have the words to tell her that the baby also measured out the distance of his life, that little he or little she was a reminder of his own mortality, and nature's way of telling him that everything in this world comes to an end.

The Family Way by Tony Parsons

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Every sunrise, speaks of your unfailing love

Every nightfall, your faithfulness

(Everything Within Me)

The universe is at Your feet, gives You praise evermore

The stars will light the sky for You

Always, God be praised

(I Adore)

But if you believe that you can recognise someone you have never met before, if you believe that there is just one person in the world for you, if you believe that there's only one other human being out there who you can love, truly love, for a lifetime - and I believe all of these things - then it follows that there's no point in pretending that tomorrow is another day and all that crap. Because I've had my chance.

Personally I don't believe you can steal one human being from another. You can't steal people... People are funny. They just slip away.

It's strange the way the loss of one person can leave such a giant hole in the middle of your life. It's not as if the hole they leave behind feels like the size of another human being. It feels more like the size of a world.

What did Rose see in me? She could have had the pick of any lipless wonder in her firm's office. Why did she choose me?

Because I'm a nice guy. That doesn't sound like much - it sounds like the kind of thing that women say they want, just before they go off with the spunky hunk in his Maserati. But Rose wanted a nice guy. And she picked me.

It's true. I was a nice guy. I always fell in love with the women I slept with, even when love was neither requested nor appropriate. I could never fuck around without feeling. A lot of the things that young men do without thinking were beyond me. Because I had listened to too many Sinatra records. Because I always wanted a trip to the moon on gossamer wings rather than a quick shag. Because I was looking for the one.

She saw something in me. Something that was worthy of love.

But niceness is finite. It's like money and youth. It ebbs away when you are not looking. It leaks out of you. Look at me now. I'm nowhere near as nice as I used to be.

I don't want to give up on life and love and all the rest of it, but I can't help myself. It's because life and love and all the rest of it have given me a good hiding. Life has made me feel like death warmed up.

I've lost my faith and I don't know how I can ever get it back. Because I still miss someone. And because I will always miss her.

Is that okay, Rose? Is it okay to miss you?

The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers saying goodbye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can't do it in your own time at arrivals. You can't decide when it's time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it's time to say goodbye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don't know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.

You think that you will watch someone die with something like horror, then you watch them die with nothing but love. Because somehow the horror passes, all the black feelings caused by the thousand unspeakable indignities of cancer, or at least you learn to exist with it all. But the love remains, and it overwhelms the fear and sadness and loss, that terrible sense of loss that is worse than everything.

But loving someone is not the same as liking them, is it? It's not the same as just accepting them for what they are. Love's all right, I guess. I don't know too much about all that. I'll settle for just being liked.

It's funny. You love something and then one day it's suddenly gone or changed or lost forever. But somehow that doesn't stop your love. Maybe that's how you know it's the real thing. When it doesn't come with conditions and get-out clauses, when it doesn't have a best-by date. When you just give your love, and never stop giving it, and know that you never will. That's when it's real. That's when they can never touch it or spoil it or take it away from you.

One For My Baby by Tony Parsons