Her mother had told her that when she was a girl. Whenever you’re in trouble, just remember you’re your own best friend.

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible

As corny as it sounds, Gallagher said, life is very long. You're supposed to mess up when you're young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes-as you did in this case. But things rarely stay the same. People grow up and change. They move on.

You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't.

Things didn't really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

It’s hard to see what’s good, what’s right, when you’re in the middle of it