"I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up."
Benna walks through life in a bit of a dream. She hardly embodies the concept of forethought. In her relationship to birthdays, she talks about how she finds stability in the midst of her wandering. A birthday is a sure thing; it will occur every year on the same day. To Benna, she counts on her birthday to distinguish any changes which have occurred in her life over the previous year. By meeting up with her friends, she can see how they've changed and reflect upon how she also has changed. "
"Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight."
Benna has the beautiful perspective which only experience can yield. Looking back over her life, she can identify patterns, mistakes, and idealism. When she was between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-seven, she lost sight of any system of beliefs which she formerly held. Because she then developed a new philosophy at age thirty-eight, she has concluded that this must be a sort of format for all lives. Young adults must all struggle through a stage of disbelief an confusion before they arrive at more seasoned, better conclusions about life.
"I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love."
Frustrated by repeated rebuffs of his advances, Gerard speaks of his love for Beena. He wants her to understand and to empathize with what he's experiencing on his side of the relationship. She is rejecting him, but he is the one being rejected. This leads him to feel like he must pretend or trick himself in order to keep trying to win over Beena.
"Personally I've never put much store by honesty -- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce."
She's a curious individual. Throughout her colorful, adventurous life, Beena has come to conclusions which are rather obtuse. Since the word itself is hiding something in it's silent initial couple letters, "honesty" must be a myth. She believes that if it were a true concept, then the very word itself would reflect that idea. Since it doesn't, she extends grace when people fail to uphold the potentially mythological concept of honesty.
