Bottom line, Eliza— you’re my home and my family, and I don’t want to lose you. I could lose everything else, and as long as I still had you and a guitar I know I’d be all right. Do you get what I’m saying?

This is what it means to be in the middle of love, I thought. Being in the middle of love is like being in the middle of a war zone.

I'd never seen that look on another face before, had never identified it in another person. I'd only met with it in fiction. But everyone falls in love with Holden Caulfield when they're sixteen. They read Catcher in the Rye and don't feel so alone.

The question is one of faith. Faith in my talent. Faith in my decisions. And faith in the idea that the truth, even if it can’t pay my bills, can still set me free.

Don't waste your time with fear.. Fear won't keep you safe from being hurt.

Everyone feels that void. Everyone who has the balls to look inside themselves, anyway. It's what life's all about.. A search.

And when Paul dove to embrace me, the look on his face was one of absolute, perfect joy—the kind of joy that can't be reproached, stolen, or marred—the kind that only the innocent or the ignorant are capable of experiencing.