“Long ago people used to say what they wanted out loud and hope that someone would give it to them. They called it praying.”

“Does loving someone mean you want them to be safe? Or that you want them to be able to choose?”

“Every minute you spend with someone gives them a part of your life and takes part of theirs.”

“If you loved someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to snatch them from the wind. Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.”

“Here," I say. "You can put music behind it, and it will be your own." And it strikes me that this is how writing anything is, really. A collaboration between you who give the words and they who take them and find meaning in them, or put music behind them, or turn them aside because they were not what was needed.”

“And even if you could use the sample to create someone a lot like the original person, it would never be the person themselves. You can’t bring anyone back, ever.”

“If you let hope inside, it takes you over. It feeds on your insides and uses your bones to climb and grow. Eventually it becomes the thing that is your bones, that holds you together. Holds you up until you don't know how to live without it anymore. To pull it out of you would kill you entirely.”