“Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like--to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To accept it, with all the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.”

“You had to know someone very well to make them laugh like that. She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did not know him at all?”

“She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did now know him at all?”

“She had broken, become something else. She didn't know what yet. Could you love someone in the process of changing? She did love Linh. As much as a ghost loved. The mind treacherous.”

“The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.”

“I did not know then that there are those you love no matter how much they hurt you, no matter how many years have passed since you felt them in the morning. I did not know how long it took to get over such a love, and that even when you did, when you loved again, you would always carry a sliver of it in your stitched-together heart. I did not know that you could love them in death, and that if one day they returned to you in a dream or half sleep, you might hold up your hand as she had done, because life and time had changed you.”