"How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?"
- Sonya Hartnett
"My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go."
"I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it."
"They thought back on the tales that the soldier had told. They remembered Hazel, the gentle Bethlehem donkey, who used the last of her strength helping those who needed her. They remembered the donkey..."
"I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with he..."
"I fail to see how turning the subject over like compost can do anything except raise its stink."
"I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of a cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it."
"Evangeline's obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery."
"But what she feels is sometimes hard to express...Much of what is best in her is warped on the voyage from within to without."
"I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you."