If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

The more you get past pain, the more it goes from coal to diamond.

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

You can miss a person you've never known.

I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day.