I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live. - Jonathan Safran Foer

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. (p. 181)

But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.