...they'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they?...Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.

I read because one life isn't enough and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.

I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.

I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.

That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.