The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.

The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening -or what's happened- to me. Not even my mom.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

It is war now, and armies need symbols.

We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.

Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.