“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

“Daedalus, I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.”

It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

Naomi was a pencil sketch of a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character.

“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.