But there was a difference between being stuck and choosing to stay. Between being found and finding yourself.

Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.

Hope is possibly the only inexhaustible resource on earth.

It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them.

We've lost a lot of years, but you can't lose love. Not real love. It stays locked inside you, ready for whenever you are strong enough to find it again.

You can’t have relationships if you’re not willing to open yourself up and lean on people as much as you want them to lean on you.

Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.

Pushing through fear was what eventually set you free.

Dreams shape the kind of human beings we become. Not having a dream gave me a smaller future and made me a smaller person.

In so many ways, for so many people, freedom was still an illusion. Barrie thought of the statistics she had read about how many women and children were still enslaved all over the world. Now— not three hundred years ago— and she wondered how it was possible that so little could change. Sometimes it seemed like the world was sliding backward and no one was noticing.

The hardest part of changing things is knowing how much needs changing,

Things, and people, were always more beautiful when you were afraid to lose them.

But the people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood.

Family is always a mirror. You can hide from other people, you can even hide from yourself, but your family is going to reflect what you’re doing right back at you.

You didn’t find strength when you couldn’t live without it. You found it when you had someone or something you loved so much that it forced you to stretch the edges of yourself further than you thought was possible.

It took vulnerability to forge strength, the way true courage required fear.

You're asking me to look into the future and give you guarantees. Magic isn't a recipe for baking cake.

Fighting to protect the people you cared for was one thing. Trusting someone you loved to fight for themselves took a different kind of strength and bravery.

It occurred to her that all the bad parts of life, the sad parts, the frightening ones, were meant to be offset by moments and memories like this. She had to be present in it, right here, right now.

Barrie wanted to fall into him, her lost to his found, her need to his want. Kissing was like the physical form of magic, all potential and the sense that anything might happen. When she was kissing Eight, she felt like she could fly.

Learning to love yourself is easier when you have someone to show you how.

Ultimately, wasn’t dance a whispered question? A story told through the position of a foot, the tilt of a head, the touch of a hand, the brush of an eye. A rite of passage. A claiming.

Which was worse, telling a person you loved them when you didn’t mean it? Or loving them and never telling them at all?

Is there a reason you look like you want to murder me?""Not particularly. You have that effect on people.

So many of the things she had found lately hadn't been precisely lost. But she wasn't found without them.

Sometimes, though, we let ourselves get so used to being 'fine' that we lose track of how 'not fine' we are.

You're torn between wanting to be closer and wanting to push me away," he said. "So I vote for closer. I'll always vote for closer.