“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

“There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.”

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.”

“If you didn't love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go.”

“Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.”

“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”

“If you only shine light on your flaws, all your perfects will dim.”