Books allow you to be whoever you want to be, to escape yourself for a while.

Usually redemption implies rescue - being saved. What were you being saved from?' he inquired, his voice carefully neutral. 'Ugliness.

Why don’t you focus on where you’re going and less on where you came from?

Everybody who is somebody becomes nobody the moment they fail

It's hard to come to terms with the fact that you aren't going to be loved the way you want to be loved.

Regret is just life's aftertaste.

True beauty, the kind that doesn't fade or wash off, takes time. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that creates the stalactite, the shaking of the Earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that breaks up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would have otherwise never existed.