“I do have friends, but they don't know me, only someone I've created to take my place. Someone sculpted from ice. I keep the melted me bottled up inside. Where no one can touch her, until, unbidden, she comes pouring out.”

“I don't want to be kept safe! I don't want to have someone constantly trying to keep me from tripping on my own incompetence. I want to live in a world where I know the rules, where people are just people. Not one where they keep trying to eat me. That's the reason I left the city in the first place. I don't want to be kept, not by anyone.”

“I only know that one day you wake up and realize it doesn't hurt quite so much. Until then you can put yourself in the hands of God- He'll see you through. You can take it from someone who knows, dear. I've found his hands to be an easy place to rest.”

“I don't need to be any place else, because the music takes me to the only place I want to be right now. To the place where I am and have always been wholly me, the only church I've ever belonged to, the only place I've ever prayed.”

“I sort of lean back into him. Like I'm melting into him. And in that instant, I finally know what it feels like to be whole. I've been wishing for my life to get better. Now I realize that James can take me to a place where everything's the way it should be. He can definitely take me there.”

“She didn't know how to love, to give herself to someone, to out herself in someone else's keeping and take him into hers. She didn't trust anyone with her heart - or the darker places of her soul.”