“I have all this stuff—all these thoughts going on inside me and they all seem so—so dangerous." —Tyler”

“Life...moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops—but the changing doesn't.”

“You're a part of me...You're in my heart. Forever and always, all right? —D”

“You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?”

“People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.”

“No one stops to think, though—that maybe there is a reason for the darkness. Maybe people have to be reminded of it—of its power. At night, we go to sleep against the darkness. And if we wake up before morning, a lot of times we're afraid. We need it all though—the darkness and the light.”

“You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.”