“Nat:I don't know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around--like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: "Oh right. That." Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometime's it kinda ... Not that you like it exactly, but it's what you have instead of your son, so you don't wanna let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn't go away, which is ...Becca:What?Nat:Fine ... actually.”

“The grief doesn't go away, ... "But you...get used to it, you know? It's like carrying a heavy stone, one that's really too heavy for you: you learn to settle the weight properly, and then you get used to it, and then sometimes you can forget you're carrying it.”

“That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you've got to carry it with you. You can't carry the Earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and become impossible to believe in them.”

“Not that I was obsessive or anything.Au contraire, mon frere.For the record, I would like to point out that it is NOT obsessive to memorize a boy's schedule so that you can accidentally bump into him. It is called being efficient. Why waste time and energy running around town trying to guess where a guy's going to be, when instead, you can actually know? And then you can actually be there. Pretty straightforward stuff, I tend to think.”

“Don't you long for something different to happen, something so exciting and new it carries you along with it like a great tide, something that lets your life blaze and burn so the whole world can see it?”

“But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.”