If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.

Coincidences mean you're on the right path.

Perhaps we were each allotted only a certain amount of love - enough for only an initial meeting - a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being.

Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience - nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.

Every day is a masterpiece, even if it crushes you.