Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.

Something in his voice reminded me that his mom was dead, and I thought about how everyone always seemed slightly uncomfortable when discussing their fathers in front of me. They always seemed worried I’d be reminded of my fatherlessness, as if I could somehow forget.

My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really—which meant I guess that he was still living, too.

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

The first few days, I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other's past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

Every loss is unprecedented. You can't ever know someone else's hurt, not really...

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.

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.