"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."

"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."

"I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

"and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart."

"I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same."

"You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride."

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"

"You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

"When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires"

"Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far."

"And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt."

"Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence."

"Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey."

"If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

"You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals."

"Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions."

"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it"

"A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations."

"She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck."

"The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come."

"Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner."

"The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do."