“Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.”

“You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in.”

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

First Memory

“—it whispers into the water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.”

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.”

“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”

“heart a door so heavy it hasn’t been opened in decades.”

“It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found when I saw it in your hands,”

““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”