“Eventually, I told myself not to expect anything from him, and as a result it has gotten easier for me to take what comes.”

“I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself.”

“What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.”

“As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.”

“Well, I had the other problem," I told him. "I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in.""What happened then?""What else," I said. "It broke.”

“I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.”

“It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.”