“It was such a light, freeing feeling to not base her life on someone else’s opinion of her.”

“From the moment I told her about my dad, it was as if her whole body sighed in relief. As if someone else’s misery comforted her, made her feel as if she wasn’t alone.”

“I will never let someone else’s opinion define my reality.”

“She'd never known true contentment before now. She had waited her whole life for someone to set her free.”

“From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.”

“Feeling someone else’s anger is bad; being left alone is worse.”