fiefoe

The book itself:

... you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile.
During the Age of Silence... No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life... Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I've always been right to love you.
Feelings are not as old as time... It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy;
The way (the angels) live together is not unlike a fresh litter of pups: blind and grateful and denuded... Only from time to time does an angel find in herself a defect that causes her to fall in love, not in general, but in the specific.

And its second author:

It is not known that Litvinoff's favorite flower was the peony. That his favorite form of punctuation was the question mark.
After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?
Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to he sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.
He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom.
All night, he'd been monitoring the ebb and flow of distance between their various body parts with growing pleasure. But the shifting measurements had been so fractional that this sudden charge by Rosa's nose almost reduced him to tears. Realizing his mistake, he blindly stuck his neck out into the gulf. But by then, Rosa had already counted her losses and pulled back into safer territory. Litvinoff hung in the balance. Enough time for a waft of Rosa's perfume to tickle his nose, and then he beat a hasty retreat. Or he began to beat a hasty retreat, when Rosa, not wanting to take any more chances, shotput her lips into the contested space, momentarily forgetting that appendage, her nose, which she remembered a fraction of a second later when it collided with Litvinoff's at the instant his lips mashed against hers, so that with their first kiss they became blood relatives.

"The History of Love"