If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?

I think we deserve a happily-ever-after." "If anyone ever did, it's us.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

I've always been able to see you," I say. "It's a rather lovely view.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong by you, do right by them.

And just like that, something inside shifted very subtly, so that all the empty spaces in him suddenly disappeared, so that his breath timed to hers, so that his blood sang. This is why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just didn’t have words big enough to describe them.