When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.

If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...

Wounded. Like Caroline Mathers had been a bomb and when she blew up everyone around her was left with embedded shrapnel.

Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else's body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.

One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways pain is the opposite of language.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.