“You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.”

“Some people like living in black and white worlds. Let them stay there. Appreciate all the colors you see in your world though.”

“The world is not ready for some people when they show up, but that shouldn't stop anyone.”

“I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.”

“Two wrongs don't make a right, but neither does one. Revenge may seem petty by day, but on some nights she becomes Justice.”

“Remember that every person who you come into contact to on any given day has a story that is probably far more amazing than you will imagine and no one is going to just offer up their entire life's worth of experiences to you because you want them to. It takes time to draw someone's story out from within them. It takes trust. It takes sincerity and dedication. Keep in mind that each and every interaction you have with all those people on a daily basis is a unique opportunity to develop any kind of relationship with that person that the two of you might want to be a part of. It doesn't matter how you meet them or what it is that you do with them. It can be as mundane as waving to them in the morning as they leave their driveway, or it can be as huge as saving someone's life in a moment of uncertainty and sacrifice. Each person has the potential to become a friend or a lover or to simply teach you something important and then slip back into the endless rush of other bodies moving about the planet around us. Don't pass these chances up too often, or you'll get lost in the tide yourself.”

“Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in.”