“If there is a particular time that defined the clear yet inaudible sound of a life beginning to unwind, this was it, the moment before her life began to spin off course, like the point in a novel at which everything that has come before turns and past events reveal their significance. Yet we didn't see it.”

“That's why I'm compelled to tell this story - don't we all have one secret that has shaped us we are burning to reveal? - to convince myself that I'm entitled to my own life.”

“There are certain things in life for which we can never be prepared.”

“We enter people's lives and then realize we've walked into a deep and long history that shapes and gives form to our every moment.”

“If I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I'd imagined it before, that I'd say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposites, the kind that couldn't exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust.”

“She believes that her daughter was in agony and that she chose not to suffer; she needs to believe that through her death Kim now lives on a higher plane. "Why else are flowers so beautiful?" she says to me. "why is the sky such a perfect shade of blue? There has to be more than the here and now.”

“As I listen to the stories about those who suffered and ended their lives it seems to me that it isn't as if they wanted to die, but more that they wished to feel better and didn't know how.”