We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening--that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth--it was a fearful loneliness.

Autore: Andrew Sean Greer