From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse - breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn't wanted on either. It was called falling in love for a reason - because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.

They say that there are moments that open up your life like a walnut cracked, that change your point of view so that you never look at things the same way again.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears; a rush of blood, of consequence? Do you now how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it?

I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do.