Illness cared nothing about money or fairness or the things you planned to do later.

But after all this time he didn't know what he wanted to do. Let her go? Keep her close? Somehow do both things at once. Be free, and haunted, forever. If only he could keep her inside a box, safely stashed away in a closet drawer, to be taken out only when he wanted.

If he could just have one more day when nothing was wrong, when time could be wasted, because there had still been so, so much of it out there.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach only for the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit.

We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.

Like old wood, we splintered apart at the slightest touch, until we were nothing but slivers stuck in each other's fingertips.

The seas are full of forgotten monsters, yes, but they're full of forgotten glories too. And the people who stay home and sit out the war never get to see them. That's what I think, anyway.

Now he regretted things even as they were happening or even before - knowing that they would happen, because he lacked the will to stop himself.