Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.

I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you.

People are like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remai ned invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.

That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.