The Library of Heartbeats

Adults can’t console children because their worlds are too far apart. Children are content with love, and they know it’s all that adults can give them.
Children can’t console adults because adults don’t give children that power. Adults console themselves by telling themselves that at least they have the ability to console children, but it’s an illusion.

This was the problem with adults: they weren’t sincere; they needed to tell lies. Because no one can always be right. And anyone who’s fixated on being right needs to lie.

That was the beauty of a love that began big; accepting each other’s misery and absurdity was, in fact, the truest test of love.

...love is never alone. Fear is always right beside it.

There are certain things you only do if someone tells you not to.

…the life we dream is so much greater than the one we realise. So why do we give more value to reality than to our dreams?

After the first time, which defines their nature forever, feelings are never replicated with the same intensity again. Not because the people we meet later in life are less important, but because the structure of our emotions hardens, and is no longer open to transformation in that same reckless, definitive way.

‘It is loving, not being loved, that counts.’
Thanks to this sentence, which his mother often repeated when he was a child and for some reason had suddenly floated back into his mind, he was finally convinced that a good childhood was to be loved to such an extent and in such blessed abundance that you could afford, one day, to be the one who loves.

…children are only taken seriously when they are rational, clear, and explain themselves well . . . basically, when they are not being children

…becoming a parent is a bit like embarking on an announced shipwreck. If it’s not the waves, it’s something else: the wind, the people you meet along the way, the rough sea. Everything seems so complicated that no matter how hard you try, no matter how careful you are, you’ll still end up in the water at some point.