Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?

Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.

I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

Only the living can be readers.

It's not good to know things ahead. It screws up your life.

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.

Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.