“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

“I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.”

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a h...”

“I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus...”

“The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained wa...”

“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.”

“But theres a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasnt near you.”

“Isnt that what true romance is supposed to be about? Finding the person whos your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night.Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning.”

“I realize that I quite like this girl. Its not just that shes so pretty the words fly out of my mind before they can leave my mouthits that when were chatting, I feel like Ive known her all my life.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”