“Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.”

“I didn’t get you the most powerful gem in the world just because I think you’re powerful,” he said with a teasing smile. “I got you the most powerful gem in the world because of us.”

“But even though she was wise beyond her years, she was still young, and so was I, and all of our words were drowned out by the noise of our beating hearts, screaming at us that we were, after all, creatures of flesh and blood.”

“Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.”

“I never knew how empty the world could be, how colorless, until I tried to live in it without you”

“Those antidepressants Dr. Huang gave her were some kind of miracle drug. I considered giving them a try, but I didn't think they'd work for me. I had no cause to be happy. I felt sad with good reason, and it wouldn't be right to mess with that feeling. I thought I ought to just stay sad for a while.”

“There had been a computer he had also built himself on the farthest corner of the room, but he had sold that a couple of months ago to buy me a necklace. I wore it then, it was two silver hearts linked as one. That’s what he and I were, we we’re one.”