“I'll be your family now," he says. "I love you," I say. (....)He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching his arms for stability as he considers his response. He frowns at me. "Say it again.""T...”

“I regret..." Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. "I regret my choice.""What Choice?", and... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision."”

“No matter how long you train someone to be brave, you never know if they are or not until something real happens.”

“Because inside me is a beast that snarls, and growls, and strains toward freedom.. and as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.”

“I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body.”

“Crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion.”

“The scariest thing about distance is that you dont know whether theyll miss you or forget you.”

“I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.”

“A week feels like a year when youre seventeen and in love. A twenty minute drive might as well be an ocean. But we were together again and the whole world was rejoicing, even the gravel crunched me...”

“No. Ye loved him. I canna hold it against either of you that ye mourn him. And it gives me some comfort to know ..." He hesitated, and I reached up to smooth the rumpled hair off his face."To know ...”

“In his arms Ive finally found the place Ive been looking for, where fear cant touch me, where memories cant reach, where the past is forgotten and the present is enough. Where the present is, in fa...”

“Our relationship with the world can only be better when we know ourselves well!”

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away a...”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of makin...”