And I guess that's when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.

But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.

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

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.