“Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.”

“I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.”

“It takes a long time to open someone like a book, you need to press your spines together. Then the patterns of your spines get imprinted, pressed together in invisible moulds. Someone else's bones nestled in with your own bones to form little memory fossils. Sometimes, if you run your fingers down someone's back you can feel the notches, it's like reading in braille.”

“This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again--your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It's all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back.”

“Having you in my life is so comforting, because it's like you feel and say all the same things I always did, but hearing you say them somehow confirms them for me, the way it's impossible to feel the same pleasure from running your own fingers through your own hair. What I'm trying to say is, you just can't tickle yourself.”

“Chills run down my spine as our fingers intwineAnd your sighs harmonize with mineUnmistakably I can still feel your heartBeat fast when you dance with me.”