It's so damn hard to bloom... to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without...love,

Love was a sacred garment, woven of a fabric so thin that it could not be seen, yet so strong that even mighty death could not tear it, a garment that could not be frayed by use, that brought warmth into what would otherwise be an intolerable, cold world- but at times love could also be as heavy as chain mail. Bearing the burden of love, on those occasions when it was a solemn weight, made it more precious when, in better times, it caught the wind in sleeves like wings, and lifted you.

A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.

...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.

In this world only the paranoid survive.

She sat watching the street and its businesses melt away in the thick tides of mist, partially re-form, and melt away again, over and over, as if some celestial power had ordered the end of the world but kept having second thoughts.