Zaynab

But break, my heart,

"...love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself"

"Look, happiness watched is greater than happiness lived, alright?... Happiness is a universal noise. A human being is just a noise. We die when we're silent. ... Because happiness, when yelled, Joy when not protected but joy projected is hope. It is strength"

"You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature"

"I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones, or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread..."

"The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad."

"One has many first loves. When one reaches a certain age, one cannot help embarking on an audit of the heart. A review. And one considers all those loves, those dreams, those youthful passions, in the context of a whole life. And it's interesting to note what endures. There are some that remain and become lasting loves, and some that fade, and one realizes were probably never true loves at all."

"Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word"

"There are different kinds of darkness. There is the darkness that frightens, the darkness that soothes, the darkness that is restful. There is the darkness of lovers, and the darkness of assassins. It becomes what the bearer wishes it to be, needs it to be. It is not wholly bad or good."

The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet"

"We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it"

Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is usual, now.

"The real tragedies hadn't happened to me, and yet they haunted my life"

Everything I love has always had a tendency to be taken from me

"... sometimes the door we open belongs to someone else. And sometimes we let someone in, only to be left out in the cold. Yet sometimes, despite what we may want the door just has too many locks"