“…..plainly put, I loved the way he effortlessly forced my pen to act savagely, to swerve course without warning.”

“i was tired of playing the child and acting the way many of my friends did - the ones who are afraid that love is impossible without even knowing what love is.”

“Without hesitation but with a sense of entitlement, he lifted my hand to his lips. He was gentlemen-like in every way... I don’t know why I wondered if it was an act or for real.”

“Give me yourself, O my God, give yourself back to me. Lo, I love you, but if my love is too mean, let me love more passionately. I cannot gauge my love, nor know how far it fails, how much more love I need for my life to set its course straight into your arms, never swerving until hidden in the covert of your face. This alone I know, that without you all to me is misery, woe outside myself and woe within, and all wealth but penury, if it is not my God.”

“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”

“It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?”