"Some people say, 'Save yourself and you save your ways.' I say, 'Be yourself and you save your soul."

"Crying wasn't like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it's done."

"Some things you cannot wish away or think away. They become part of you when you remember them."

"No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way."

"Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often."

"Instead of going home, I drove to the library. To hell with human beings. I’d always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood."

"I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream."

"I'm at the point where going forward is easier than going back."

"You cannot dispute the ridiculous. You cannot argue reasonably with evil."

"Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?"

"Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?"

"Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more."

"She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her."

"She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He's like a dragon, ancient and fearless."

"Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more."

"That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward."

"Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he'll love you forever isn't finished with you until he's done."

"It's not the lie that's the problem; it's the distance the lie forges between you."

"You can never tell about a person by guessing...that's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood."

"What men yearn for they often destroy."

"Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.' ...'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still."

"Some stories stayed with you even when you wanted to forget them."

"Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight."

"We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could."

"(Love) walks up to you,and when it does, you need to recognize it for what it is and, perhaps more important, for what it might become."

"I can hurt myself more than anyone else can," she told her sister. "I can do it with my eyes closed."

"The best way to die is when your living"

"Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity."

"I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown."

"Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be."

"It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too."

"But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say 'No. I disagree.' that was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself."

"Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene."

"It was as if hope had appeared out of nowhere to settle beside her and it wasn't going anywhere, it wasn't going to desert her now."

"Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories."

"She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all."

"Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones."

"What you dream, you can grow. Someone told me that, but I didn't believe it. I said I had nothing and that people with nothing are unable to dream. But I was wrong."

"This day is going to be awful. It's the sort of day you wouldn't mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter."

"You are only worthy of what you prove yourself to be."

"I was beginning to understand.My grandmother's love was cold because she was afraid of things;that was why everything had to be perfect."

"The truth frightens people because it isn't stable. It shifts every day."

"Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote."

"I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived."

"...but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not."

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse."

"Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot."

"Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times."

"Young people believe that regret is something you will never feel if you simply do as you please, but sometimes it is a matter of degree."

"The frightened walk away when love is difficult. I know that now. You have to be willing to give everything away. You have to be willing to end up with nothing. Only then will your heart be whole."