The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.

You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it

The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

Some things you don't have to promise. You just do.

He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?