The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai just moved from the unread list to the read list of my Booker-winning novels.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself. (page 3)

The "she" in the quoted paragraph above refers to Sai whose losses including her parents who died in Russia, her grandfather who lived in limbo between the past colonizing power and now independent home country, and Gyan whom she fell in love with but grown apart because an insurgency of local people had transformed into a fight between two lovers.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Rationally, I decided that if you still believe in love, you pursuit to fulfill it. You could divide it into small achievable steps, but never dawdle on your way. The key to feel something deeply was not deciding which things--you could feel deeply about anything. The feeling could only be as deep as the time you spent feeling.