What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

When you’re hurting deeply, you go inward.

the relationship between people knot so easily, there needs to be a person skilled at working free the threads. Sometimes, though, the only way to extricate a tangle is to cut it out and start fresh.

You came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you'd been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you. [...] I said that next time, you had to take me with you." "Was there a next time?" "Well, you tell me, you don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs?

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?