“It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be; you couldn't help but hate her for doing that to herself, and at the same time hate yourself for giving in to it, and underneath all of that, despite your hate for her, couldn't help but love her.”

“She used her heart to love him, not her head, not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself.”

“All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things.”

“How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?”

“For a while, I thought I might be in a love story, but I hardly ever wake up next to anyone anymore. It still happens once in a while. When it does, the first thing I do, doesn't matter where I am, in the ocean, on the moon of some minor distant planet, doesn't matter where, doesn't matter if she knows who I am of if I know who she is or how strong gravity is or if I feel terrible or if the world is logically impossible, the first thing I do if she's there, is I tell her how nice it is to see her.”

“You are good," I say. "No I'm not. I'm not I'm not. I'm not," she says. "I'm no good." And then, softly to herself: "Am I?”

“Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.”