"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?"
"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."