That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.

I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

Margaret thought of all she knew for certain, that day would always follow night that love was never wasted nor was it lost.

I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything.

It wasn't right to have someone charge into you your world without even asking, acting as if you were nothing more than an egg to be flipped and flopped, sunny-side up or scrambled, depending on the whims on whoever ran your life..._