"But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here."
"When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation."
"A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up."
"Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry."
"What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior."
"All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here."