“I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to d...”

“College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did notintellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere be...”

“He was everything your mother warned you about when she told you not to walk alone in the dark.”

“I'm not going to force you into anything you don't want. But I'm also not going to take a vow of chastity and pine away for you, or whatever the hell it is that men do in romance novels these days....”

“As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight.”

“All right, she said a little sarcastically. I was going to assume you liked eating babies and sacrificing virgins, but I might as well ask, what do you do for fun?I languish in sin, I replied in th...”

“They will hate you if you are beautiful. They will hate you if you are successful. They will hate you if you are right. They will hate you if you are popular. They will hate you when you get attent...”

“But even when I stop crying, even when we fall asleep and I'm nestled in his arms, this will leave another scar. No one will see it. No one will know. But it will be there. And eventually all of th...”

“Cinderella was such a dork. She left behind her glass slipper at the ball and then went right back to her step-monster's house. It seems to me she should have worn the glass slipper always, to make...”

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

“If an apology is followed by an excuse or a reason, it means they are going to commit same mistake again they just apologized for.”

“Apologies often cannot undo pain; but they can acknowledge it. And part of the cruelty of bullying is that the bruises it leaves are on the insideits a hidden form of violence, shrouded by shame.”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”