“You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things”

“When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.”

“How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.”

“You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.”

“I like that you let yourself be surprised”

“If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.”

“You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ” “Ready.” “At least I tried.”