“In youth,' he said, speaking as if from a great distance, 'we believe, and the death of belief forces us to disavow all belief. But that disavowal, time softens, and if we do not believe, we hope. Belief is easier to kill, somehow, and its death easier to bear.”

“Not all of our heartless plans work as we intend; nor do all of our good intentions. We are where we are, and we can rarely predict where we will go, no matter how firm our beliefs.”

“Lies were something you told other people to make things easier, somehow - hopefully, for them, but often more selfishly for yourself.”

“Stop judging your life only by the failures," he whispered."What should I do?" she whispered. "I'm always going to fail.""We all do," he said softly, his voice closer now. "We all fail. But none of us fail all the time.”

“Manners,[...] are severely underappreciated in my opinion"."Oh?""Where practiced well, they remove the probability that someone in my position will be forced to go through the effort of killing someone in yours. Believe that on occasion that much death can become tedious.”

“She wanted to die. She wanted to die. Because then it would be over. All the loss, all the grief, all the pain, the emptiness - over. And she had said nothing then. Nothing. Nor had she crawled into her room and swallowed her mother’s pills, or crawled into her bath and opened up her own wrists. As if death were somehow personal. As if death were somehow an enemy that could be faced and stared down, she would not give it the satisfaction of seeing how badly it had hurt her. Again.”

“It's always easier,' he offered at last, 'when you feel these things yourself; seeing them in other people reveals just how ugly they are.”