My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.

He was still in love with you, anyway.

I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.