I'm a bad boyfriend. She's a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.

The way we still essentializ, we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.

Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.

I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.

I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.