Her lips were like the soft ridges of dunes in the desert at sunset; like the crests of waves meeting in the frothy rush to shore; like the folded wings of courting birds.

It's a very hard thing to resist, real goodness, in a tough man.

I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.

Every virtuous act has some Dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everythign has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument.

I couldn’t tell him that I felt too weak and beat up to climb a mountain: sometimes, all the guts you have is the guts you pretend, because you love someone too much to lose their respect.

We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.

The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we’d done in life, and what we’d lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone.

The beautiful courage of us, the hope that defines our kind, is that we go on, no matter how much life wounds us. We walk. We face the sea and the wind and the salted truth of death, and we go on.