“Lately I've been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and how I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be. And when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: before I die, I want to be somebody's favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

“Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

“Men wanted me. They all did, however briefly, but none of them wanted to keep me. That's what I needed. I needed to be owned, loved. BUT NOT BY A MAN. I knew then that I never needed to be kept by a man. What I needed was to love myself, to want to keep myself around. And in that revelation, I knew that if I wanted to keep myself, that a man wanting to keep me would just be a by-product.”

“I've never felt about anybody the way I feel about you," I confessed in a rush. "I can't imagine that what I'm feeling isn't love. But 'I love you' doesn't feel adequate to express it." I plunged headlong into babbling. "I desperately want you to love me. I need you to love me - but I don't want to need it, and I'm afraid that I need it too much.”

“[...] “I want to wake up with you in the morning, I want to fight with you in the afternoon, and I want to make love on any and every available surface in this place. And then I want to do it all over again. Come upstairs with me, Sophie. I’ll keep you warm. I’ll keep the darkness away.”

“And now I feel like crying, because I really do not understand, and I don't think I will when I'm older either. It was only when I loved Franz I understood the world, and felt happy. When you love, you're praying. Everything was quite clear. I wanted to be good. I think you begin things the right way when you want to be good. And I think I'm doing everything wrong now because all I want is for people to be good to me. I want to be loved, everybody wants to be loved; for a thousand people who want to be loved there may perhaps be just one who wants to love. Our Father which art in heaven...my heart is all a lump of grief.”