More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Friends became eyewitnesses to your weaknesses, your secrets. Friends could weaponize your vulnerabilities against you.
Loving someone, Sam realized, was more complicated than songs and novels made it seem. People always wanted to talk about the falling-in-love part, the rush of hormones and giddy excitement and breathless kisses. But being in love, sharing a life, meant so much more. You loved someone knowing all their scars and vulnerabilities and flaws. You loved someone even when they hurt you; more than that, you let them hurt you, because the last thing you wanted was to become a burden on that person—another weight pressing on their shoulders, when they already carried so much.
People who insulted you to your face rarely bothered to stab you in the back.
“Being a princess isn’t about wearing a crown. It’s about who you are in here.” She reached out to place her palm on Sam’s sweatshirt, square in the middle of her chest, and Sam’s heart wrenched.
“Home should make you feel secure and safe and utterly at ease. When you’re home you should feel like you belong. Like you fit perfectly.”
“A person can be home, you know, just as much as a place.”
That was the thing about people who had known you since childhood: they understood you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. They could hurt you better than anyone, even when they didn’t mean to.
Was it possible to fall in love with someone a second time? Well, why not? It wasn’t any more impossible than any other impossible thing in this wild, unpredictable world.
“Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid. It means you refuse to let your fears guide your actions.”
“Love is a conscious decision that you have to make over and over: committing to someone, choosing not to be with anyone else. Some days you will make each other happy, and some days you will disappoint or hurt each other. But even when Alexei breaks my heart, I choose to love him, and that is better than never getting to love at all.”
And what was love if not a form of faith? When you fell in love, you took your whole heart and gave it into someone else’s keeping.
“I want the kind of love I have with you: extraordinary, breathtaking, wondrous love. It might be difficult at times, but the best things in life always are. Nothing worth having comes without a bit of effort.”
But paradise doesn’t really feel like paradise if you’re not there to share it, Sam.
“History matters, but the future is far more important. And I promise you that I will be with you for the future, whatever comes.”
Love could only ever strengthen you; it lifted you up and made you a better version of yourself.
