You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever

They ask, how could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here?

The only way someone can leave you is if you let them.

I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.