“If I could change a single thing about my life,' she said gently, 'I would not have been so unhappy when I was young.”

“Who would one rather be? The one who desires, or the object of desire? One's answer to this question might determine if he is meant to be a poet or something else entirely.”

“For each of us, he understood, is born into our own time and eventually the things we held as the center of our world, dearly, unforgivingly, must fade.”

“For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness--and poetry--find entrance to the human soul.”

“Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.”

“She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption.”

“The people who matter the most to us in the end, who teach us the most, are the people who make their worst mistakes with us.”