You asked about love. I don't know about love, Daphne. I just know I don't want anything but you. I don't want to anywhere but with you.

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.

Once, my mother told a whole host of angels that she’d rather die than go back to a man she didn’t love.

In his youth, he was electrified. The stars were moving in his bloodstream. He would not have been cowed by the customs of an earthly monarch. When he loved, it was with a heat and a desperation that he carried like a sword. He loved in the way that Greeks burned cities.

I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was lie down for a prince. They burned the city to the ground.

The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.

I'm not about love, but in this moment, I wish that I were.

You're terribly selfish, you know. I've loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.

Are you waiting for someone to come and get you?” I whisper. I sound small and thirsty. He doesn’t answer. Instead, he bends his head and kisses me, just once, then let’s me go. When Connor would kiss Angelie in the halls last spring, he did it like he was trying to suck the chocolate off the outside of a Klondike bar. It could last for hours. This is more like seeing a star fall - thrilling and soundless and then over.