“How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?”

“Seclusion wasn't good for anyone; it made you forget how to protect yourself.”

“What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.”

“Its funny how you can let yourself forget for seconds, how even in the heat of the horrible, you can have moments when you fool yourself into thinking it might all be okay”

“Always be yourself. There is nothing else you can be. How can you be not yourself? How could you be something else than what you are?”

“She was hurt, Artie. And I don’t think I could tell you how scared I was. It was like watching a flashback of you, dying. I couldn’t protect you. And I couldn’t watch that again.”