I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.

One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.

My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what's good for you. It's your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You're an idiot if you think it means you've met your soul mate. So I was an idiot.

You … You had always made the future feel safe. As long as you were in it too, beside me, I could be okay.

Because that’s how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else.

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.

This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?