He says “You’re the catch anyway.”
She answers “That’s the joke of it though — I can’t be caught!”
“Doesnt mean youre not a good catch.”

She shakes her head.
“I’m a high, hanging ball on its way out of the park. But thank you, you’re sweet.”
“You never know when a stiff wind is gonna keep one in the park,” he offers.
“The weather and I are generally at odds. I’ve made peace with it.”

“Never say never.”

A long, sad sigh. They’ve had this conversation so many times over the years, both knowing where it ends, in some fictional life preserver of promises meant to keep them both from feeling adrift in a sea of coupling bodies, theirs only meeting out of need or chance.

“Oh I wouldn’t,” the answer finally comes, “but I’m also not going to sit around hoping for something that I so regularly and deliberately work to squash anyway. I’m sure there’s a crisis years down the road where I start beating myself up for not being more receptive to some advances/getting married and doing all of that, but for now I’m ok giving myself a pass and not freaking out about a life without a man dwelling inside of it.”
“Its ok,” he answers, “you’re gonna marry me someday.”

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
-from Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time

For Hawking, the turtle story is one of two accounts of the nature of the universe; he asserts that the turtle theory is patently ridiculous, but admits that his own theories may be just as ridiculous. “Only time will tell,” he concludes.