“How do you punisha man when your heart beats in his chest? How do you hurt your beloved without also hurting yourself?”

“How do you punish a man when your heart beats in his chest? How do you hurt your beloved without also hurting yourself?”

“Sometimes, we need little lies to save our pride. And sometimes we need big lies to save our souls.”

“Some would say it is madness to want a woman this way,but I think it must be love. Not the tepid, fickle love of which thepoets sing—the love that forms or fades with kindness or cruelty.No, this love is something more divine—like the love of a god, bothvengeful and benign. It is as constant as the sea. And as beautiful.As dangerous. As mysterious.She is the only woman to ever refuse me. And yet, I want…”

“Why do you dwell on things that don’t matter when there are so many things that do?”

“You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.”

“It's what you do to yourself when you go mad with rage. You have no idea how much you can hurt yourself with your own strength.”