“Hospitalizations in general are blurry. The days are the same, precisely the same. Nothing changes. Life melts down to a simple progression of meals. They become a way of life fairly quickly. You may welcome this transition. It may seem inevitable to you. You have been removed from the world. It is all right, in a way, because there is nothing so sure, so safe, as routine.”

“It’s because you’re different. You can’t live life by rules others give you. In that way, you and I are the same. You have to find your own rules. All my life I’ve been running away from their rules, Hayat. All my life. You will be the same.”

“Just as a good chief executive officer keeps looking for ways to change because he or she knows that nothing will be the same in five years, so you, too, as the chief executive officer of your own life, must always be looking for better ways to make changes. You must be flexible enough to get around the new obstacles that are looming on the horizon, and you must be willing to change course if you have to.”

“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.”

“The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.”

“Sometimes there is a single moment that changes your life forever. After that moment nothing feels the same anymore. You try to get back into your normal routine, but something is different, something's changed. Finally, you realize that everything is just the same as it always was. The only thing different is you. Hadie, you are that moment, and you have changed me. Forever.”