“Don't make me sit through reality.”

“Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the c...”

“Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.”

“She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she'll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom.”

“She thinks of the way angels arrive, when you lease expect them, when the road is dark, when you're bleeding and alone and hopeless, when you're sleeping in a basement, convinced that no one knows ...”

“Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didnt want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didnt feel so good today.”

“I've never minded it," he went on. "Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not truly be lost if one knew one's own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.”

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”