“this…living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn’t mean you’re half alive. It means you’re half dead. And…that’s no way to live.”

“I’m one half of a two-piece puzzle.”

“Once a heart breaks…it doesn’t just grow back. It’s not a lizard’s tail. It’s more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it’s not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn’t make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don’t mend and they don’t heal. They just don’t work that way.”

“Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you’re going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can’t just fix one with no concern for the other. ”

“What’s more, you’re loads better than you think you are.”“So why is it I get to thinking that way?” I puzzled.“That’s because you’re only half-living.” she said briskly. “The other half is still untapped somewhere.”

“The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain.”

“Look at yourself right now. You’re half dead from blood loss, and you’re out shopping. These disguises look great, but that’s all they are: thin sheets of maybe standing between you and trouble.”