“…I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn’t have met, and who didn’t like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.”

There is a whole lot more to life than winning.

I thought anything might happen if I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t eat. I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul.

My nerve endings seemed to have come alive; they almost jangled with anticipation I was going to see Will. Whatever else,

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours? But I had promised.

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life—real life—seems to exist at one remove.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service.

You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere.

I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

I frowned at the list. “So… I’ll go back and tell the Traynors that I’m going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics-

… if you’re going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.

I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak.

Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.

Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it’s just because you’re still a bit drunk.

When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.

The biggest obstacle was mixing abortion with overpopulation. These are two things that have nothing to do with each other.

You can’t repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.

The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think.

Declare Church and State forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres, and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation.