“The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.”

“We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.”

“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, tol...”

“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”

“Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.”

“You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, you...”

“Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken my...”

“The scariest thing about distance is that you dont know whether theyll miss you or forget you.”

“I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.”

“A week feels like a year when youre seventeen and in love. A twenty minute drive might as well be an ocean. But we were together again and the whole world was rejoicing, even the gravel crunched me...”

“The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world.”