Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.

Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to.

She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big. As big as she could. She promised Bailey she would keep playing.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indicated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back. She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better

Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and I'll show you a girl who can't put her pants on. -Annik Marchand

Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.