...because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound. - Salman Rushdie

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

The first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.