“But you," "Sixteen is perfect. You can spend the rest of your lives together. He won't have to be alone.”

“Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.”

“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live”

“You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.”

“But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you... you can have all of me or nothing. I won't be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you.”

“You can survive alone, or you can *live* together. I know which option William would chose—has chosen,” he said, shaking me as if he wished he could shake some sense into me. “You have to make your choice.”