Now I understand - how sleep allows you to forget, but your pain wakes with the dawn, worse because for a split second you don't remember what you've suffered.

I don't understand how the pain of losing him can be a pale shadow in comparison to the pain of finding him again.

I want to be someone strong and brave enough to make hard choices. But I want to be fair and loving enough to make the right ones.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.

My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side.

But there's something fundamentally wrong in a system where a girl like Meredith would even consider staying with a boy like Dylan if she has the chance to be free of him.

You can't outrun what's inside of you. You can only acknowledge it, work around it, try and turn it into something better. I may not know exactly where I'm headed, but this time I'm choosing my own destiny.

And I understand in a way I never have before that loving someone is always going to feel like flying - the unthinkable drop, the fear of falling, the heart-in-your-throat thrill. It is always going to be impossible until the moment that it's not and you're soaring on pure faith, your altitude completely dependant upon something you can't control.

I don't trust most people. Except for you.""Why me?""Because everyone needs someone to put their faith in.

You’re easy to read, Ivy, but the whole book of you is complicated.

My mission is not to make him happy and bear his children and be his wife. My mission is to kill him.

But recognizing the ridiculousness of an emotion and being able to master it are two very different things, I'm finding.

But I want to be better than the lessons they taught me. I want my love to be greater that my hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance.

I'm glad she's not faking affection. It's more honest than what her husband is doing, at least. Dislike is an emotion I can respect.

There are only two choices. Stay here and die. Or get up and see what happens next.

How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is?

And maybe that's love, too - feeling the other person's hurts like your own.

No one controls who we turn into but us.

He didn’t save me, though. He allowed me the freedom to save myself, which is the very best type of rescue.

Life is one sick joke after another, I'm discovering. Because it hardly seems fair that it should hurt so much to finally get exactly what I've been wishing for.

The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore.

Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.

Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.