Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.