“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture or violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. ”
″ ‘It’s better this way. I don’t want you to have a broken heart.’
‘Love can’t kill me,’ I say, parroting Carla’s words.
‘That’s not true,’ she says. ‘Whoever told you that?’ ”
“She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.”
“The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ ”
“I shook my head, still staring forward at the real-life nightmare unfolding before me.
I felt Caleb’s eyes on me, assessing me as I watched them.
‘You really like him, don’t you?’ It came out like an afterthought; a passing observation that had just occurred to him.”
“She learned back and looked at him with something like hurt, and then he almost but didn’t say the two sentences he’d been meaning to say for years: Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”
“When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, ‘One day you’re going to fall in love.’ I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years.”
“I’ve been in love with you for ten years, so I thought it seemed like time to find out whether you felt the same about me. Which, I guess, you don’t.”
“I don’t know. I have a lot of dreams about my ex-wife, Catherine, where we’re friends like we used to be. We’re not gonna be together, we’re not together, but we’re friends still. She’s not angry.”
“Does a woman’s broken heart ever truly heal or do you simply become stronger and find better ways to conceal the pain? You see, I might not know your name, but you can’t fool me with the lines, telling me you don’t care about him anymore, but I can see it in your eyes that he hurt you. Don’t be ashamed of the pain: embrace it. Don’t turn your back on the pain: face it. Let it all out and release it to the wind and when you’ve gotten it all out, there will be just enough room in your heart for you to finally love again.”
“The pain involved in a premeditated broken heart would easily compare with a case of assault, and yet no court of law would recognize it as a crime. A broken arm heals.”
“But at that moment, Shang coughed and they all let go of the rope, and the basket fell down and down and down. Not only did the wolf bump his head, but he broke his heart to pieces.”
″‘Send the poor little motherless lamb away, Father? You couldn’t,’ cried Mother. ‘Her very own father calling her names. I just know her poor little heart is broken.‘”