“Some creatures are just meant to be left alone. They can’t be held on to, even if we love them more than anything.”

“Because some things are never meant to be anything more than a moment. And that was one of them.”

“The world in which we live is held together by love. The world in which we love is held together by fate. The world in which we die is of our own making. Death comes from hatred and man is the only creature who hates, stronger than he loves.”

“And seriously, if we as a society can’t even bother to treat a simple, unassuming, stunningly gentle and demonstrably sentient creature like a cow or a deer with a modicum of decency, how the f*ck do we ever expect to be able treat each other–infinitely more complex, wildly divergent and often exasperating individual human beings– with anything even remotely resembling civility? It just ain’t gonna happen.”

“And that’s the worst of it, the part no one ever tells you about.” “What part?” he said, his voice still clenched with grief. “How it never stops. How the pain of missing people never stops. When you burn your finger in a fire, it hurts, but it only hurts one way because you know what caused the pain and why the pain is there, and you know that it will settle, in a bit. But heart pain has facets, Silas. A thousand different sides, sharp and hard; most of them you don’t even know exist, even when you’re looking straight at them. When someone leaves, or dies, or doesn’t love you in return, well, you may think you know why your heart hurts. But wrapped in there are a hundred kinds of fear all tangled in a knot you can’t untie. Nobody wants to be alone. We all fear being left alone, being left behind. I know such things exist. But you must learn to see death as something more than loss, more than absence, more than silence. You must learn to make mourning into memory. For once a person takes leave of his life, that life becomes so much more a part of ours. In death, they come to be in our keeping. The dead find their rest within us. Thus, in remembrance, we are never alone. But people forget the power of memory. So we fear death in the deepest place of our very being, because we don’t know that memories make us immortal. We focus instead on being gone and the awful mystery behind absence. Love and death—and those two are very closely bound together—scare us because we can’t control them. We fear what we can’t control. That fear is really part of what makes us human, but mostly, we’re just afraid of the ends of stories we can’t foresee.”

“We can’t survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn't want to.”