“Sometimes something comes along and tears your roots right out the ground, and that’s when you know you been planted too long.”

“Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.”

“There are days when you wonder why these wretched old tatters of paper run my life. It's just leftover scraps from vanished lives, right? And they seem to control your every waking thought, all of your movements, even how you breathe, sometimes, with the fragile stuff. Your whole life. But then something comes along, a clue or sometimes the solution to a puzzle, and it sets you on fire!”

“Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.”

“I learned that love can transcend race and time, and that it can be beautiful and perfect and worth fighting for but also fragile and heartbreaking, and sometimes sacrifice is necessary. That sometimes it's you against the world, and there are no easy answers. That you have to know when to hold on...and when to let go. And even if that love comes back, you could discover something in someone else who has been there all along.”

“Sometimes, when you’re sad you don’t know what to do, it helps to be angry. But then the tears come back again all the same, and you fall asleep with the salty taste of them on your lips.”