Hope asks you to act, to risk, to want something enormous that might still be taken away — and after seven years of training myself to want nothing, to expect nothing, to survive by keeping my heart closed around a small hard grave, being asked to hope again was almost more than I could bear.

It would have been easier, in a terrible way, if he had stayed dead.

Hope is the most frightening thing there is, because hope can be disappointed, and I had organized my entire survival around never being disappointed again.

That is what I was really weeping for in that truck: not just joy, though there was joy, but terror — the terror of a man being handed back the very thing he had spent seven years learning to live without, and understanding that to accept it he would have to become, once more, a person who could lose everything.

I chose it anyway.