“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.”

“I am thinking about you, I say to her. Can you hear me?”

“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.”

“To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.”

“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.”

“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.”