“Everything takes time… and that’s something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to.”

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.

You all expect to live the lives you chose. Especially a successful young man like yourself. But it takes time.

I’m not going to try and change you mind.” “If you’re here, you accept it’s my choice. This is the first thing I’ve been in control of since the accident.” “I know.” And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it.

I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again.

You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.

How is it possible to exist with so much pain?