I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself.

You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.

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.

I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?

let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.