“They also learned that not everything broken could be fixed, and that not everything ruined cold be thrown away. Sometimes the damaged things were all you had to work with.”

“Everything was broken, meaning everything could somehow be fixed.”

“I'm not broken, I'm ruined. Do you understand the difference? With broken maybe you can fix things. Ruined? All you can do is wait to bury me.”

“She was damaged and broken and there wasn’t any kind of glue in the world that could fix her.”

“When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.”

“Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.”