What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.

What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.

When I turned fifteen, I remember my father gave me a credit card which I was allowed to use for two things: emergencies and books.

Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.