And then I understood that she had no idea what she'd done to my family. She thought love and hatred were equal.

I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

You have to choose the voice you are going to trust. You can't listen to everyone.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

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.

No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.