"In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”"
— Janet Fitch

"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

And we certainly wouldn't write about it."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead)

"Sometimes it seems safer to hold it all in, where the only person who can judge is yourself."
— Sarah Dessen

"Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future."
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)

"All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below."
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)

"I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered."
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)

"Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me."
— Dorothy Allison

"Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away. "
— Gayle Forman (If I Stay)

"Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill."
— Gayle Forman (If I Stay)

"I watched as she stretched over the board to flick off a fallen leaf. Underneath her thin cotton shell, I saw how fragile the bones in her back were, far too sliver-prone, far too light to support a pair of wings.
"
— Connie May Fowler (Before Women Had Wings)

""I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death."
— Alice Sebold (Lucky)

"Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand"
— Alice Sebold (Lucky)

""That we can never know," answered the wolf angrily. "That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe to the present. Here and now, and nowhere else. For nothing else exists, except in our minds. What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.""
— David Clement-Davies

"for the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
— Elie Wiesel

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"I can say anything, but the things I want to say are trapped in that wide open space so I don’t say anything at all."
— Jennifer Lauck (Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found)

"It's easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say. "
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or gears?"
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March.

.........

I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.

I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.

I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

I am thawing."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)

"But it's enough, just having this day. It's the knowing there's something different, something special up there waiting. It's the knowing you could choose to change your days--climb up there and throw yourself right down the throat of the only and last and greatest terrible secret in the world. Except you don't climb up."
— Natalie Babbitt (Kneeknock Rise)

"Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back."
— Alice Hoffman

"Some things you cannot wish away or think away. They become part of you when you remember them."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

" 'Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.' "
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

" 'Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.' ...'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still.' "
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"Still, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a mistake for people like us to be tied to a place. If we weren't meant to be ready and willing to wander. If everything we needed was contained in who we were.
And what we remember."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime..."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"For you, a thousand times over"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up."
— Gayle Forman (If I Stay)

"I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"Safety is the most basic task of all. Without sense of safety, no growth can take place. Without safety, all energy goes to defense"
— Torey Hayden

"I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening."
— Meg Rosoff (How I Live Now)

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. "
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.

And now I will have to be that person forever."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken. There is a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief, which leads to joy. And a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being" --the poetess Rashani, quoted by"
— Bri Maya Tiwari

"Sometimes words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow. "
— Alice Hoffman (The Story Sisters)

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
— Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, Special 75th Anniversary Edition)