#coming-of-age

"I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason."

"I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape."

"Your personal truth is your gift to the world."

"Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”“You whacked me on the head with a ball!”“You deserved it."

"I know that this process of ‘me changing my life’ doesn’t just end once I set fire to this list of things I hate about myself. Tonight isn’t as much of a new beginning as it is a violent end and I know the real work hasn’t even started yet."

"The one thing I do remember is that as I retraced my steps through all the familiar streets of my life, Inow felt completely lost."

"Everything hurts right now and nothing is helping because as the pain is getting worse — so is the love."

"Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?"

"Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget."

"I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing."

"I can do this… I can start over. I can save my own life and I’m never going to be alone as long as I have stars to wish on and people to still love."

"I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years — across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break because our souls are tied."

"Whose little boy are you?"

"He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face."

"For so many years, I couldn’t understand why every time I thought that someone finally loved me, like… for real, they would eventually turn to vapor. Every person whom I’ve ever loved is trapped inside of my chest. I’ve breathed all of them in so deeply that I’ve nearly choked and died on every soul that I’ve ever given myself to."

"Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back."

"I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault."

"I fantasize the night sky to be like a cosmic blue print of my life as I close my eyes and unbutton my heart…. just in case anyone up there is listening."

"If ever I was running, it was towards you."

"I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I realize the inconvenient, inappropriate truth: ‘I love this man… and it has swallowed me."