And all I loved, I loved alone.

That's it. It's all going to end. - The realization wasn't crushing. It was gentle, like a final tendril of smoke from a dying candle.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To Be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives - or to find a strength in a very long one.”

It was an awkward morning, made for unpleasant thoughts.

Do not surrender before you are beaten

It's what I am, and if you want excuses, come and take them.

It's about passion. It's about dynamic events; it's about change! People with passion are people who will destroy - for a man's passion is not true until he proves how much he's willing to sacrifice for it.

Love, he found, was a jail. It trapped, and it clipped wings. It dragged you down, forced you to places you didn't want to go.

“But the rules were made by wealthy men in private smoking rooms who pulled the world’s riches to themselves like well-dressed spiders in the center of a golden web. People of significance; people who could never be locked away in small rooms and forgotten. The best I could hope for was a life spent creeping in their generous shadows - an in-between creature neither loved nor reviled, but permitted to scurry freely so long as I didn’t cause trouble.”

I am the only storm that matters now, and there is no shelter from what I bring.

Heart attack far too young; poor kid, should've eaten more organic; should've taken it easy and not been so angry; the world can't hurt you if you just ignore everything that's wrong with it; well, not until it kills you anyway.

And she wonders what it was that drew her here the first time. Wonders if they are like magnets. If they have circled each other for so long that now they share an orbit.

Take your echoes and pretend they are a voice.