“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.”

“Some of us walk around with a necklace of hope, an armour of sanity, but at the end of the day, they always come off. We reveal our naked, vulnerable, real selves.”

“ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.”

“Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, la...”

“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...”