"Nostos, Martha, returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return." Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed."
"I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn't known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn't explain it properly. I didn't feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found."
"... things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us."