“Did you tell them that you made love to the poet?Did you tell them that our lovechild is an elegy?”

“You said: "Wait for the moon with me."I stayed. I waited. The moon never came.”

“Even through the smoke,you are still the most beautiful thingin this city and I, well, I am stillthe last thing you’d save in a fire.”

“Cultivate the distance. Nurture the silence. Let it grow until your fragile heart is as far and inaccessible as his marbled emotions. Don't talk. Don't move. Sit still. If he shows up, lie. Believe your own excuses.And if he tries to charm his way back in, punch him in the face.”

“He loved me like thick molasses on a summer's day. Pure, sweet, sticky, warm, dark.”

“When he asks you whyyou chose alone all these years.Tell him that it’s becauseyou love with all claws and bared teeth.Apologize for the scratchesthat you will leave on his skin;ask forgiveness for the bite marks.Tell him you never ever mean to love so hard, but you do.”

“Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.”

“And perhaps, I'm a Tuesday night and you're a Wednesday morning the way we'll never even notice how we blend into each other.”

“But when I think of us,in the quiet when I'm on my own,I think of Beauty and the Beast.I, being the beast, and you being the last beautiful thing in this city.”

“I'm sure that you didn't think I would notice,but we memorize the strangest things in a personwhen we're in love with them.”

“The first summer that we spent together,we did so many obscene things to each other, thatby the end of it, the trees blushed a shy shade of scarlet,leaves falling to the ground, scandalized by our acts.”