“How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.”

“How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.”

“You can't have real pain without real love. You can't feel grief and loss and hurt without real love. Love is the only way you can ever be really hurt deep down.”

“The queen of the sky told him that in death there is no satisfaction. Only pain will find you. So he asked her when the pain would lessen. The queen told him never. The pain is what shows us how much we loved them. If you truly love someone, then the pain of their loss will always be in your heart. (Nora)”

“But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.”

“Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go.”