Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

He can't possibly live up to the person you've built him to be

Needle and thread flesh and bone Spit and sinew, heartbreak is home. Your suture lines, they sparkle like diamonds Bright stars to light my confinement "Stitch.

Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that's the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.

For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.

Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.