“Except now, that smile was tinged with something a little dark, a little sad, a little all-encompassing. It was the kind of smile you earned from living for a while, the kind that came from having gone through hard-enough times that you truly understood how few and far between the good ones were. You knew to appreciate them. And you also knew they couldn’t last.”

“Up until this point, I’ve never fought hard enough. But if you give me the chance, I’ll fight every single day of our lives together. I’ll go to battle for you, and I’ll win the war in the end.”

“Sometimes we’re more terrified of the good things in life than we are of the bad. We feel we don’t deserve them, or that they aren’t real, that they’ll disappear quickly and easily and we’ll be left in the ruins.”

“We would never be together, and yet we’d never be apart. It was sick, it hurt like hell, and for some reason we both held onto the racking agony.”

“But what I neglected to realize was that even when it seems like everything has finally clicked into place, the biggest player in the game of life is timing — and you either have that player on your team, or you don’t.”