Quotes for Reference

It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult.

People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death. Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they’d have called it something much better.

Nathaniel had met Aubrey and Norris, and everything had started ending, so slowly that I at first couldn't tell it was even happening, and then so thoroughly that I couldn't have hoped to stop it.

One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life - its saving, its extension, its return - was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.

Now why don't you tie that notion into a noose and see if it's strong enough to hang yourself?

'Does this look like a dystopia to you?' The answer, implicit in the man's question, was that a dystopia doesn't look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else.

It turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn't mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you're on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up.

May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth - your truth, not someone else's - and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory, and philosophy I have ever known.

...but like a Dresden church with Byzantine architecture on the eve of February 13, 1945, he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A life does not have to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not have to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. But sometimes a person is lucky enough to have a life with all that anyway.

But the hardest thing is staying. The hardest thing is living with dying. Loving with dying. The hardest thing is love, with no expiration date, no qualifiers, no safety net. Love that demands acceptance of all things I cannot change. Love that doesn't follow a plan.

Riding horses was just like walking, she decided, only to go anywhere you first had to persuade a gigantic toddler that they wanted to go there too.

There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you.

'I swear,' he mutters. 'If that man is day, I'm night.' His hands find my hips. He turns his head to the left. As I begin rubbing my hands down his back all I can think is, Day and night are just two sides of the same planet.

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

Everyone can lie. He's not God. And even God can lie.

He remembered learning that water evaporated into the sky, only to return to the earth as cold rain. He always wondered why people couldn't evaporate as well, why flesh and blood weren't allowed the same privilege of rising into the sky to change form and cleanse the planet.