He doesn’t love me. He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn’t know any better. When I trusted everyone. I’m not that person any more. He’s just a boy. He was the first to really hurt me, but he’s just a boy. There were a lot of them.

But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.

You know," I told him,"if you don't know how to eat a cupcake, that's nothing to be ashamed of." Now he did smile. "I know how to eat a cupcake." "Sure you do." "I do," he said. "I just don't want one of those." "Yeah? Prove it.

The bottom line is, what defines you isn't how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back on the bike. As long as it's one more. you're all good.

You're not a sucker. You're just nice. You give people the benefit of the doubt.

Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete-like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.

The best gifts come from the heart, not the store.