“The old fear was there, the grapnel anchor lodged in her chest, the thing that wanted to pull her back away from the edge and whisper no, no, no. Yet there was a new thing: a lure. Something down i...”

“As she fell, Esther wasnt worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasnt worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her...”

“Esther supposed, as they held each other under a threadbare carpet of stars, that this was how it must always feel in the beginning. Yet even there, next to him, the most excellent person in the un...”

“Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldnt be saved, Esthers heart broke a little more.”

“The magic had started to degrade, and Rosemary had slowly but surely become thoroughly, gruesomely human. And there were few things worse in this world than humans.”

“How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?”

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more complet...”

“All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

“If you are not willing to stand up for anything or anybody, then why should the Creator take a single step to help you?”

“If I am to be fallen into love, I will. And if as a result I will appear to be stupid, disillusioned, and of poor judgment, I will. And I would be damned if I cared what other people think. For I w...”

“To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage, because we don't want to fall on our faces or leave ourselves open to hurt.”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”