That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours.

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.

It isn’t about being at the same school or the same town or even the same room. It’s about being together. Love is a choice you make.

Popularity means people think they know you.

Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing.

He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.