“Intimacy is a word with eight letters. A word with a sly hiss to it. But then it begins, like love affairs do, with a chance meeting, and then a raw empty something needing to be sated, something you didn‘t notice before…but suddenly it squawks like a hungry bird, day and night, refusing to be ignored. You love and revile it, this sore shrieking something. Or is it nothing? Or everything? It doesn‘t matter. It‘s yours. It‘s you.”

“Falling in love is like that: you always feel like a dumbass at some point, even if you know it‘s coming — it‘s unavoidable.”

“...I realized that happiness could be more—something that elevates from the inside. Butterflies in the stomach, a smile that won't go away, and it's like an addiction that makes a person yearn for more. It‘s not something one thinks about, it‘s something that‘s felt, involuntarily.I had always been a thinker, trying to find happiness and comfort in thoughts and ideas. It was only now that I realized happiness begins in the heart...”

“You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.”

“Something I'd like to be perfect at? ... Loving you,' I said. The words climbed from my mouth. 'I'd want to be perfect at loving you.”

“It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.”