S.

We're all just in the muck trying to believe we're capable of greatness, but closer to breaking than we want to admit. And we tell ourselves stories--about ourselves,but maybe also all these stories about other people, about characters--as a way to hide from how small we are.

It's what happens. You love, then you lose, then you die. Even if you survive, you die.

It's not a bad way to live once you let go of the idea that you deserve more.

What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.

-It's extremely cool how the words can stay the same but their meaning can change. -Because the reader changes. -EXACTLY

Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?" "I don't trust anyone who wouldn't.

- I can't make choices like that without knowing who I am. Without knowing all the implications. - You can't ever know in advance. Big decisions require faith.

A person is no more & no less than the Story of his Passions & Deeds.

They're not terrible people. They just couldn't be who I needed them to be.

It was stolen. As most beautiful things eventually are.

They all occupied the same space but did not occupy it together. Imagine a thousand leaves of tracing paper, each with one person lightly pencilled on it, all stacked atop a scene of a frozen city block. A thousand discreet and solitary realities that appear to be occurring in the same location.

He is a man without a past sailing in a strange sea in a world where the stars have come loose in the firmament.

-I hate that. I hate that people can't just say what they mean. -You don't. Not always. -I never say anything I don't mean. I just avoid saying some things that I do.

The thing is: you might be right to trust someone at one point, but they can change." "+ in between they must be drifting from trustworthy to not. But you can't tell how far they've drifted until it's too late.

For one moment, it is more important to take in the spectacular than to worry about the pressing business of staying alive.

I think it's love.' 'Funny.' 'I'm serious.' 'And your support for this is...?' 'A feeling.' 'You need more than that.

What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin. Words are a gift to the dead and a warning to the living.

There's a spiritual connection between flame and narrative.

This is what happens, of course: men get lost, men vanish, men are erased and reborn.

Time and circumstances change us...and it is pointless to ask why.

Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fragment of an idea of a memory, or something his mind, desperate for connections, has created on its own.

To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft.

Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey.

-That's kind of sad. -I used to think so. Now I think: you're born a certain way. Later you get to decide how much you want to fight/change that. I don't mind being alone. -You must mind. If you didn't you wouldn't be doing this with me.

This is where his life - his remade life - has brought him. Each strange juncture has led to the next and now he is here. He is here, and it is nowhere.

They speak little; it is as if the air has been churned up with decade's worth of fruitless pursuit and missed connections and thoughts unspoken, and they are waiting quietly for all this matter — these motes of opportunity forgone — to settle around them.

The feeling, for those seconds, is glorious—it reminds him that he is human, that he is so insignificant as to be utterly free, and he is being guided along gracefully, lovingly, by the hand of Nature—and it frees him, however transiently, from all worry and fear and fury and grief. 'I enjoyed that,' he says aloud, as much to the stars as to the rower.

Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?' 'I don't trust anyone who wouldn't.

If I am going out into the unknown, it might as well be the really unknown.

When you fall in love, friends, let yourself fall.