“It's tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.”

“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly.There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.”

“She once told me how she could feel the missing part of her arm- how she sometimes experienced the sensation of a hand- that it is possible to feel something without its physical presence.Perhaps love is like this and we are all limbs of one giant intangible body.”

“I think we keep these moments of rejection and acceptance very close. I think we carry them always, like cracked shells from which a part of us once hatched.”

“Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:The history of how you felt.”

“The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’renot the first to die.”

“[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.”