Lose the pessimism, Ms. Lane. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can't breathe around it and you realize you don't need air.

If he was winter, I was summer. If I was sunshine, he was night. A dark and stormy one.

I'm his locomotive and he's my shield.

He looked blank. “He’s the one who’s been doing the magic against us?” “Duh,” I said. “Doona be ‘duh’ing me, lass,” he growled, his burr thickening.

I'd vowed years ago to go to the grave the same way I'd been born, just a lot more wrinkly.

Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it's those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trails, or fracture by a permanent, damning fault line.