“Well, the way I see it, honey, love's love, whatever shape it comes in.”

“Of course, this memory makes me sorrowful now, for it anyone ever knew the shape of me, it was Amelia - and not just the outer lines of me, either, but all my innards as well. She was as necessary as the sun to me. She was the quiet heat that shimmered inside my shadow and made it live, and without her, I am a little darker.”

“Isn't that part of love, I wanted to ask, carrying someone else's ghosts for them?”

“Sometimes it's possible to see misfortune coming and prepare for it, I guess, but most of the time, when a person disappears, it's as unexpected and shocking as hail in the middle of June.”

“Who says all the lines of love are supposed to match up? I'd never thought about it that way before - that maybe your perfect other wasn't everything you already were, but everything you were never going to be.”

“I was sixteen and just waking up to the peculiar rules of love - how what's left unsaid between two people can be a far more complicated language than what's written on the page.”

“When you get back, I finally wrote, let's lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We'll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we're nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we're so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive.”