She either confused me with a much older child or else she glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I've always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it's the librarian's one sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.