“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.”

“No. I made that choice. I let all that anger and pain get twisted up in my thoughts for you. He leaned in. It fucking kills me. Every night. I relive what I did to you every night. His forehead res...”

“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.”

“Can you be a girl for a few seconds?""I'm always a girl" I frown."You know what I mean. Like a silly, annoying girl"I twirl my hair around my finger. "Kay.”

“What is it with you today? says Christina on the way to breakfast. Her eyes are stillswollen from sleep and her tangled hair forms a fuzzy halo around her face.Oh, you know, I say. Sun shining. Bir...”

“Sorry, am I being rude?" she asks."I'm used to saying whatever is on my mind. Mom used to say that politeness is deception in pretty packaging”

“I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.”

“Souls are flowers, only God has the right to pluck them. But those who commit suicide: their souls are the rotten blossoms of devil's garden.”

“We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”