“I knew that people said love should be unconditional, given like a dog gives to its master, but what Being could give that way? What could love though it had been kicked and beaten? What could go kissing the hand of its tormentor with upturned eyes? I didn't know. Perhaps Jesus, perhaps the Dalai Lama, but I couldn't. I had a condition, the way life has conditions to live, the body must have certain conditions to grow, and Cristien had to meet mine or I could not live. I could not.”

“I knew that people said love should be unconditional, given like a dog gives to its master, but what Being could give that way? What could love though it had been kicked and beaten? What could go kissing the hand of its tormentor with upturned eyes? I didn't know. Perhaps Jesus, perhaps the Dalai Lama, but I couldn't. I had a condition, the way life has conditions to live, the body must have certain conditions to grow, and Cristien had to meet mine or I could not live. I could not.”

“I knew that people said love should be unconditional, given like a dog gives to its master, but what Being could give that way? What could love though it had been kicked and beaten? What could go kissing the hand of its tormentor with upturned eyes? I didn't know. Perhaps Jesus, perhaps the Dalai Lama, but I couldn't. I had a condition, the way life has conditions to live, the body must have certain conditions to grow, and Cristien had to meet mine or I could not live. I could not.”

“To be a devil isn't so bad; to be a devil that can still see beauty, still remember what it was like to be in the sight of the most holy, now that was an obscenity, and that was what I was.”

“But what if you are a smart girl in love? All because I was a book nerd didn’t mean, I didn’t feel, I didn’t want. Shylock had cried out in excess of pain, “If you prick me do I not bleed!” But a book nerd is not allowed to be human, to say “you make me melt” and still have her mind want something else entirely?”