Sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all - just a new beginning. Because one thing she's learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you're not afraid of it, then it's not real change.

She'd never put all of herself in just one place. It felt too risky. Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her - the real her, the true deep essential Faye - they would not find enough stuff there to love. Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another.

Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.

If you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, the you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone's life, you will find something familiar.

This was the price of hope, he realized, this shattering disappointment

The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst

It's like he's experiencing his life at a one-step remove, as if he's not leading his life but rather assessing and appraising a life that weirdly, unfortunately, happens to be his.

We hold hands and pretend at forgetting.

I can't speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it

The way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other's light.

[...] and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

Something in his face was pulled tight, wrong, like underneath his skin he was crisscrossed with tape. Like he would cry.

I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it's something I could look at straight.

Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.

Everything seemed back to normal, but she knew something had changed, and she held this knowledge inside her like a splinter, something she was careful not to touch.

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control.

God was nowhere, he said to himself, but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere, and the living and the dead were joined.

Being young, Mary replied. That's the only thing that was ever wrong with you. You were young, and you though the thoughts of an undeveloped young person with a big heart and an overdeveloped case of youthful idealism. Now you're not so young anymore, and you've stopped thinking that way.

The best thing about being fifteen is that you don't have to be fifteen for more than a year.