“I'm not sure the word "sorry" does anything justice. It's such a loose word isn't it? I mean how can one puny word encompass all the stuff you did - But also the, all the things you didn't do? It's the inactions that keep people up at night. The actions, they're done. They're done. It's the inactions that never go away. They just hang there. They ROT. How is sorry supposed to stretch across all that?”

“I've been thinking about all the things I might have done differently. All the choices I didn't make. All the decisions that made and unmade me, all the actions and inactions I did or didn't take. With the shades drawn and the garbage overflowing, I've been thinking about all the bold steps I never took, all the gut instincts I didn't listen to, all the people I let down. I've been thinking about the cruel mathematics of my life, looking at my sums and wishing I'd shown my work.”

“Sure, because it's a fairy tale. They're always so tediously moral. Nobody gets away with anything fun and all the interesting people are bad guys.”

“Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna-maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.”

“Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions.”

“How do you know that?""Because,"Chong said with raised eyebrows,"when you open those things called 'books',there are words as well as pictures.Sometimes the words tell you stuff.”

“You're going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it's always their actions you should judge them by. It's actions, not words, that matter.”