“I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.”

And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life…well, gradually became livable again.

Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

​​​​​​You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you’ve…um…entertained his wife.

Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.

I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.

Is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress.

Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.

I could hear her babbling away beside me, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I could barely focus on anything.

But just as nature abhors a vacuum — so does the human heart.

I just… want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

“Nobody listens any more. Everyone knows what they want to hear, but nobody actually listens.

Cheap as chips, cheap as chips, it’s a British expression. There’s no couture in their darling.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

We last longer if we compete against ourselves for the good of others instead of competing against others for the good of ourselves.

I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.

Together, we will continue to support the fight against this cruel disease as cancer through elements as important as prevention and research.

I think my whole life has been one of sort of daring, and sort of sailing against the wind instead of just going with the wind.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.