“Benjamin, we’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?”

“We only know how to lose and be lost.”

“The important thing is how we know, not what or how much.”

“Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.”

“Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”

“It is not the things that we have, but how we use them that is important.”

“Some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don't want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can't comfortably fit.”

“We live in a patriarchal imaginary where men cannot conceptualise women as fully human. What’s really important is how this shit resides in us, how this just lives in us, man, even if we’re the good guy – it should give a motherfucker pause.”

“Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.”

“We all lose sometimes. We fail to get what we want. Friends and loved ones leave. We make a decision we regret. We try our hardest and come up short. It's not the losing that defines us. It's how we lose. It's what we do afterward.”