More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I know what it is to hide who I am. I know what it’s like to live on the edges of society.
Really, people didn’t deserve dogs.
Why were rude words always so unfailingly funny when they came out of a child’s mouth?
If you have to choose between being kind or being truthful, it’s usually better to be kind.
She couldn’t fathom what it must be like to be so loved and to be so sure of that love that you would fight tooth and nail to protect it,
“It might seem sometimes that all we are is odd and different, but the truth is, we’re amazing. We’re part of the earth below us and the sky above us. Our veins echo the patterns of rivers and roots. There’s sunlight and moonlight in our bones.”
Her love of all sensory joys had gotten her in awkward situations before,
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m now done sniffing you.”
“I’m whatever okay is when you multiply it by a million,”
I’ve noticed over the years is that some people are nice and some people are kind.
Niceness is good manners, and stopping to give someone directions, and smiling at the overworked cashier at the supermarket. These are all good things, but they have nothing to do with what’s underneath. Niceness is all about what we do when other people are looking. Kindness, on the other hand, runs deep. Kindness is what happens when no one’s looking.”
like every person who had flashed in and out of her adolescence, they would decide she was too something or not enough of something else and snatch away their welcome.
She hadn’t understood how exhausting and heartbreaking it had been to hide such a big part of herself all these years, to reshape and contort herself into something more acceptable.
when someone leaves, all you can do is leave a window open for them so that one day, if they choose, they can come back.”
A lot of nice people stop being nice when they don’t get exactly what they want.”
After he died, she fell apart. She was a ghost. She barely got out of bed, barely ate, barely spoke. She couldn’t do anything for me.”
“Kira looks at you like you climbed up into the sky and put the moon there yourself,
Maybe some kinds of trauma can’t be revisited—and some need to be.”
“I’m afraid I’ll never leave a mark on anybody.”
“It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong,” Jamie said, his eyes on the house ahead. “Sometimes we need to make that place.”
In a month or three months or six, who was to say they wouldn’t decide, like everyone else she’d tried to love before, that she was simply not worthy of being loved in return?
It’s a leap of faith to love people and let yourself be loved. It’s closing your eyes, stepping off a ledge into nothing, and trusting that you’ll fly rather than fall.
Danger rarely wore a monstrous face and a wielded a pitchfork. No, danger came most often in the form of people like Edward, the nice people whose niceness only went so deep, who saved their niceness for people exactly like them, who believed they were more deserving of power and respect than anyone who was a little bit different.
