“The way you’re feeling right now makes you appreciate all the good times you have. All the pain of change and loss… those make you realize how much you love the things you have.”

“I’ve always had some kind of connection to the things I’ve owned. Losing them left me feeling bereft because they were linked to everyone and everything in my life that was important. And unlike the people I loved, I could control them – At least I could when I wasn’t losing them. Objects are safe, too. I mean they don’t change much. A pen stays a pen and a set of keys always unlocks something. You can go back to an object, hold it, remember who you were when you loved it. That’s something you can count on.”

“Those other moments that I’ve been re-retuning to seem to fade a bit every time I go to them. It’s kind of like reading the same book over and over. You keep trying to capture what you felt when you first read it, but the feelings just aren’t ever as…magical.”

“I think back to Kristen’s musings about the nature of existence … nonexistence. Her wonder about who and what her baby was before it was conceived. Now I wonder the same thing. Who was I before I existed. Who am I now that I no longer do?”

“The right thing to do is so easy to see when you're seventeen years old and don't have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you're grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn't a tidy little arrow pointing to it.”

“...Maybe instead of fire and brimstone, hell is just a feeling of loneliness”

“Sometimes it is the sharp contrasts in life, the bitter and the sweet; things not working out as planned, relationships falling apart, losing your loved ones—these are the things that shake you and make you appreciate life, see the good in it and love anew the people around you.”