“I don’t want to be happy. I want to have you by my side. To have you by my sadness and my depression. To have you. Your love. Your care. That is much much precious than happiness. I am a nothing and a no one. But I am everything in your hands. So hold me.”

“His eyes are a little swollen. He has flushed them with water after a night of crying and thinks no one will notice. But in reality everything is noticeable, so the funeral guests have left him alone. Not out of respect but out of fear, because the world is afraid of those who cry.”

“I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life.”

“If the book doesn’t have that miraculous, unspeakable thing that makes common words, word heard thousands of times, lash out and astonish; if each page can simply be turned without making the hand tremble a little bit; if the words can’t stand up by themselves without the foundations of an argument; if simple emotion can’t be found without searching for it, if it isn’t present in every line; then what is a book?”

Our hands contain our humanness. Sometimes they give us away. They clasp a chair while we pretend not to be scared. They sweat from the palms while we beg our foreheads to stay dry. They also hold. They pray. They dance along the keys of a piano. They tickle. They dust themselves in flour. They shape bread. They scratch the back of a lover. We hide so much in this life, but I don’t know if it is possible to hide the way a hand can open and close itself out of care or loss or love.

What a thing it is, to fall in love, to want to know everything there is to know about a person and yet, at the same time, to find the smallest detail—a blade of loose skin peeling from the lower corner of the fingernail—entirely overwhelming, too lovely to bear.