“If youre smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”

“But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.”

“It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.”

“But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing.”

“on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.”

“Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to...”

“There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sp...”

“My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are...”

“If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.”

“All the drain leads to the ocean...So chill out and enjoy the motion!”

“The rich eat life, the poor eat death; so what is the problem they ask?”

“It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and w...”

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

“Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.”

“But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.”