It is a great virtue to be needed. Greater, even, than being liked

Scary thought - what if I get to know myself and I'm someone I don't want to be?

I love my life, my family and my friends, and I'm drawn to 'relationship' novels because of their affirming focus on the power of love to heal wounds and transform lives.

There's a kind of love that has the power to save you, to get you through life. It's like breathing. You have to do it or you'll die. And when it's over, your soul starts to bleed. There's no pain in the world like it, I swear.

There is something about losing your mother that is permanent and inexpressable - a wound that will never quite heal.

Fear and love were sometimes the same thing both necessary unavoidable. Now she understood that it was okay to bleed if you know how to heal.

She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.