So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

The most wicked criminals have God on their lips at all times, for God is the only one who can stomach them.

To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room.

The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night's sleep.

Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

One always imagines that the days that change one’s life must be marked with something extraordinary in nature—storms and lightning, darkness at noon, and so on. In truth they are indistinguishable from any other, which is one reason we feel mocked, as if the world is telling us we are inconsequential.