“I was reminded of the old man who used to go into a large city church every day and just sit there. One day the minister asked him what he did each day. The old man smiled and said, 'I look at Him, and He looks at me.' That's real prayer!”

“Was it worth it?” he asked me, breaking the silence.“Was what worth it?” I asked, looking up at him.“Taking a chance with me,” he said softly, kissing the top of my head. “Not thinking, going with your gut?”“It was the best chance I’ve ever taken,” I said, snuggling closer to him and breathing in his familiar scent.”

“I kissed his forehead. “You don’t have to thank me. I told you, I do anything for someone I care about.”He pulled away and looked up at me. “You said you do anything for someone you love.”I didn’t know how to respond to that. We were in such a precarious place. I didn’t want to say anything that might scare him away or let him know how I truly felt, because at the end of the day, I loved him. It was that simple. Instead I gave him a small smile. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

“As his mother drove him away on the day he was let out, Stuart broke the cardinal prison rule: like Lot's wife, he looked back, at the building he'd just left.”

“Oh! if to dance all night, and dress all day,Charm'd the small-pox, or chased old age away;Who would not scorn what housewife's cares produce,Or who would learn one earthly thing of use?”

“My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue”

“The moment that I realized that I wanted to be a better man for him and that because of him I was a better man than I was before I met him, that was when I realized that I loved him. No flaw that he had, no quirk could ever make me stop loving him and he knows that, so he's free to be himself and he's free to love me and because he loves me I'm free to be myself, knowing that no flaw that I have and no quirk could ever make him stop loving me.”