“I’d have much rather gotten dragged into someone else’s fight than face what was waiting for me. Other people’s emotional pain, no matter how painful, is so much less painful than your own.”

“To see someone you love in so much pain—especially emotional pain that can’t be remedied—was the worst form of torture.”

“Margrethe watched them paralyzed by the intensity of the emotions moving through her. So much pain and euphoria, a sense that even though her own heart was broken, the world could contain such beauty and magic she almost could not bear it? What did her own pain matter, in the face of that?”

“True love means that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”