“Led Zeppelin! I clapped my hand over my mouth.This big, strong man, wearing a muscle shirt and cargo pants, sang rock songs to a toddler in the middle of the night. I was so toast. Game over. And it was doubly terrifying, considering I had no idea how to make him stick around. He would leave and take his sweetness and his Pepto and our hearts.”

“Allie,” he said. “You told me once I had a white-knight complex. You said I saved you.”He was going to say I saved him. It was going to be so romantic.“But the truth is,” he said, “I didn’t save you—I stole you. I wanted you and I knew I didn’t deserve you, but I didn’t care. And for some reason it seems like youdon’t either, so it seems to me that I should make it permanent before you come to your senses. Will you marry me?”

“It was a rather dark shade of gray, his declaration, but I didn't think I'd ever heard anything more romantic than Colin telling me he'd spend his money, break laws, do anything he had to, to give me what I wanted.”

“My mind took up a chant. Hurt me, hurt me, hurt me. Make me hurt, cry, bleed. Make my outside match my inside. Help me get it out, because I can't cry on my own”

“For all their weirdness, I LOVE the penis people. I don't understand them. I can't imagine I'll ever learn their language of grunting and scratching, but I'm going to try. If I have to devote my life to learning, I will do it. I can't explain the compulsion that is me thinking about Stephen now. Or just watching a boy walk by and wondering what is going on inside his head. To have him want to play with my hair and take me exciting places. To touch his amazingly fabulous butt and not be arrested for assault.Don't they have a distinct smell? When do they start producing that spicy, manly, different-from-me scent? I don't mean the sweaty, take-a-shower odor, but the yummy soap and a hint of cologne. The kind of scent that makes me want to inhale in their general vicinity just because I can.I get fluttery and gooey and cease to function at higher levels. Like I shut down except for feeling things; like the hot rays of Stephen's manliness and the solid rock of femur and muscle under his denim cargo pants.”

“He pushed harder, deeper into her, his thrusts taking on a restrained violence as if he needed to give her as much of him as she could take.He took on an almost desperate rhythm, digging his fingers into her hips. She was rising again, chasing after him. At the height of it, the man above her disappeared. All that was left were the sensations he pulled from deep within her, the heady, spiced scent of him and the laboured pant of his breath in her ear.”

“Just because I had a good game doesn't change who I am,my identity is in Christ and not in basketball, I love playing basketball and it's my job but at the same time I recognize that I'm a sinner and that's not gonna change regardless of how well I play on the court”