“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurour and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!”

“Colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt, as Italians call it. When love strikes someone like lightning, so powerful and intense it can’t be denied. It’s beautiful and messy,cracking a chest open and spilling their soul out for the world to see. It turns a person inside out, and there’s no going back from it. Once the thunderbolt hits, your life isirrevocably changed.”

“I don’t want to be the china doll you glued back together. I don’t want to look whole from a distance, but when you get close enough you can see all the cracks."He runs a gloved hand down my cheeks, "The cracks make us who we are."I shake my head, "We can be better than this.”

“The wind blowing through the cracks in the walls was fitting for this isolated and lonely place.”

“A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.”

“Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,You owe me no subscription: then let fallYour horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:But yet I call you servile ministers,That have with two pernicious daughters join'dYour high engender'd battles 'gainst a headSo old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!”