“This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing.”

“..."he's the only thing that ever made me forget what it felt like to forget.”

“No, no, no, so not getting the point of fear. Because fear wasn't about what made sense. Fear was about possibilities. Not things that happened. Things that might.”

“To be good is an unnatural condition. There is no man that is born knowing what humility is, what kindness and compassion and hope and love and generosity are. These are things that must be learned. Learned through trials and through pain and through suffering; held onto every inch of the way. Good is not born, it is made”

“He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations.”

“I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that—they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill. ”