“Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”

“It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.”

“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”

“Youre not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.”

“This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?""I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?""Yes," she said."That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch ...”

“In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it'...”

“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume tha...”

“Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.”

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that prec...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”