“Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.”

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there’s a shallowness there. That’s not a bad thing, really.

Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

What does it remember like?

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

Kindness, so far as we can return it, is agreeable.

Those who go forth ministering to the wants and necessities of their fellow beings experience a rich return, their souls being as a watered garden, and a spring that faileth not

I wanted the monster back and that was plainly wrong.

Never the grave gives back what it has won!

If he does not plant the field that was given over to him as a garden, if it be arable land, the gardener shall pay the owner the produce of the field for the years that he let it lie fallow, according to the product of neighboring fields, put the field in arable condition and return it to its owner.

If only the journey back could bring me to you.

He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

God will not punish the man Who makes return for an injury.