“Perhaps I was easier to shake off for you because you’re such a together person. I was just an extra layer on the outside… like a blanket you could shrug off and feel just the same…. except maybe a little colder….But I was always a broken person that was haphazardly held together by little more than my own strength. And so you just seeped in the cracks and mingled with my insides until you became an inseparable part of me. And as painful as that is, it still kind of warms me to know I will always carry a part of you with me.”

“What does life give me in the end but sorrow?What do love’s good and evil send but sorrow?I’ve only seen one true companion – pain,And I have known no faithful friend but sorrow.”

“Do you know what hurts so very much? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.’I did not know, as I listened to my father’s footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put in my had the secret that would open far darker rooms that this–places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.”

“Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.”

“It’s not reasonable to love people who are only going to die.”

“I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.”