red

“He combed his fingers through my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.”

“Love is not revenge. It can’t be thrown like a rock. And you can’t create it to fix your problems. Forcing love is like picking a flower then insisting that it grow.”

Lots of people fritter away their lives complaining that they were never able to find their true calling. But the truth is that most of us probably don’t even have one. So what’s wrong, then, with deciding on the thing that’s right in front of you and doing it wholeheartedly?

“No matter how much time passed, the sadness never went away. I was carrying this feeling around—like there was a gaping hole left open inside me. And instead of disappearing, the emptiness inside me seemed to grow day by day.”

“She was numb to the loneliness. It had become familiar and reassuring. She was exhausted from thinking about her fate. Her blood flowed slow and heavy with sadness.”

“Do I not know myself very well?”

“I ran to the station and bought a ticket. Destination: you”

They’d wanted something all their lives, but now they had it, they didn’t recognise it.

“I think that he has been angry now for so long that he is scared to let it go—that it would make him too complacent, and he might become all of those things he so despises in others.”

“This passion that can’t be talked about, that has to be concealed, gives way to the terrible question: if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists?”

“But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, unidentifiable sound can make you jump.”

“But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing. Without the sadness, he has nothing left.”

“We must try, all of us, a lot of the time, our best, and we must keep trying. We do not understand anything but we should try our best to understand each other.”

“Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you.”

“It is always strange to stand in a place where something happened to you long ago, particularly if the place has not changed much.”

“Why does the night have to be so beautiful?” “Because at night, only half the world remains.”