It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours--

It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

...I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

A beautiful woman is one with a beautiful heart. She may be covered with mud or sores but only her foot fit the glass slipper.

The real form of abuse is not a physical torture

The truth is, I'm not a coper. I hate stress. I might appear calm externally but internally it's all going on.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

Being freaked out doesn't mean you can fix what you perceive to be the problem.

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

Protect your vision. Prevail over adversity. Persevere in the midst of turmoil. Passionately act upon your convictions. Purposely walk into the day.

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

The only thing a man can take beyond this lifetime is his ethics.