"Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever… promises break… More importantly, hearts break."
"I get it now. I get it. The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end."
"Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met."
"When she finally learned how to let go of the things that didn’t matter, she discovered all the things that really did."
"I swear to you, there are divine things, more beautiful than words can tell."
"We need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened."
"The strangest thing about strange things is that they’re only strange when you hear about them or imagine them or think about them later, but never when you’re living."
"Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand."
"There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless."
"The beauty of things must be that they end."
"Sometimes words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn’t unknow."
"So let’s face it, this was never what you wanted, but I know it’s fun to pretend. And isn’t it great to find that you’re really worth nothing? The things we do just to stay alive, the things we do just to keep ourselves alive."
"Who gets to determine when the old ends and the new begins? It’s not on the calendar, it’s not a birthday, it’s not a new year. It’s an event, big or small, something that changes us. Ideally, that gives us hope, a new way of living and looking at the world, a way of letting go of old habits, old memories. What’s important is that we never stop believing we can have a new beginning, but it’s also important to remember that, amid all the crap, there are a few things worth holding on to."
"People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in real life that’s unreal."
"And then you try to remember at what point it all began. And you discover it started before you thought. Long before. And at that moment you realize things happen once. And no matter how hard you try, you’ll never feel the same again."
