Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.

I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.