“Recollection hurt so much; I could barely remember my unbroken self”

“I was hard-wired to run when I cared too much”

“Maybe that was the thing about beginnings - they always seemed better than middles or endings. And if only I ever had beginnings and my past was so perfect, then the future would never measure up. I didn't want to live like that.”

“Joe might have called that place godforsaken but I could see a whole lot of proof that if there was a God, He’d been there.”

“I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn’t matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, swinging my legs off a pier until boats rolled in with crates full of oysters and crayfish still gasping. Pulling fishhooks out of my feet because I never wore shoes, playing with other kids whose names I never knew. Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I’d slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.”

“I am nothing. I feel like nothing. I want my life to matter. What if one day I'm gone and nobody ever knew I existed?”

“I am afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of the dark, of closed-in spaces, of being alone and of getting too close. I'm afraid that I'll never again have the life I've always known, my feet in the dust and my heart full. I'm afraid of being alive; I'm afraid to die.”