“Once you get out, you don’t go back.”

“Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.”

“You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have. (Ky Markham)”

“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.”

“Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back”

“She is holding on tight to this talk of flowers, as I did before, when I was afraid and alone. If you sing and speak of blooms and petals that come back after a long time of being winter-still, you don’t have to think about things that don’t.”

“Everyone has something of beauty about them. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look blind and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, or a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. But when you see the one you love as pieces, as why's, you can love those parts too, and it's a love at once more complicated and more complete.”