What love is

(...), it is impossible for me to look back on those days without feeling a surge of nostalgia for my friends. In some sense, it alters the reality of what I experienced. I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That somehting is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

Paul Auster, Moon Palace, Faber and Faber, p. 49