"This has been an immersion experience. It feels like the time I went away to camp for the first time. It feels like what I feel when I read and really ponder Ashbery’s line in Some Trees (great poem): ‘we are surrounded.’ It feels like the moment when I learned how to ride a bike and just took off, not knowing quite how to stop, nor what I was pedaling toward. It feels like arriving in a new country where no one speaks my language and I begin to appreciate the disorienting pleasure of adjustment; at first I’m thinking in my original language all the time, and want to go home, but by the end of the trip I think I’ve found a new country."

"The thing about being an adult that no one tells you when you’re growing up is that all your stupid insecurities and anxieties, they’re still there. You’re supposed to have the answers, you’re supposed to know—but we don’t always know. Well you know what, I’m done feeling stupid and insecure about feeling stupid and insecure."

"So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them."

"In the last weeks, we’d been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before."

"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless."

"Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again."

"For she had embodied the Great Perhaps—she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps."

"The desire to write grows with writing."

"There are dreamers and there are realists in this world. You’d think the dreamers would find the dreamers and the realists would find the realists, but more often than not, the opposite is true. You see, the dreamers need the realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun. And the realists? Well, without the dreamers, they might not ever get off the ground."

"There are just lots of possibilities in the world. I need to keep my mind open for what could happen and not decide that the world is hopeless if what I want to happen doesn’t happen. Because something else great might happen in between."

"You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot."

"I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books―whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives."

"We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it’s easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found."

"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right."