“Bethany blinked. "Did you just hit me?" she asked, disbelief coloring her every feature.Skylar raised both hands, palms outward. "I come in peace!""You do not come in peace. You hit me.""I hit in p...”

“Most of the time, it felt like my father and I were completely different species. Possibly literally, depending on the day and whether or not I actually qualified as human at the time.”

“Sometimes, there aren't any good choices. Sometimes, making the right one is hard... It's funny, but when you think about it, we're all broken. That's what life does. It knocks you down and breaks ...”

“What I really needed wasn't a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn't studied for the night before. "As lon...”

“Well," a female voice said. "What have we here?""Here," Bethany said, responding to the woman's rhetorical question, "we have a teenager. And she's pissed.”

“Ive been fighting to be who I am all my life. Whats the point of being who I am, if I cant have the person who was worth all the fighting for?”

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

“We got a fightin' side a mile wide, but we pray for peace 'cause it's mostly us that end up servin' overseas.”

“A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work rather than freedom from your work, even when work might hurt.”

“Parenting requires a delicate balance of letting your child be your spiritual teacher while you maintain the clarity and boundaries to be her Earthly teacher.”

“Remember, nothing is ever created or destroyed. Therefore, unresolved emotional pain from childhood does not dissolve by itself. It sits waiting to be declared, and a child is the ultimate vehicle ...”