“People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.”

“When I was little, I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something’s getting hurt. It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant that no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you’re actively sought out. You’re the slug, and they’re holding all the salt. And they haven’t developed a conscience. There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolved in the water that’s part of a slug’s skin, so the water on the inside its body starts to flow out. They slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me. With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.”

“There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.”

“the relationship between people knot so easily, there needs to be a person skilled at working free the threads. Sometimes, though, the only way to extricate a tangle is to cut it out and start fresh.”

“A jewel's just a rock put under enourmous heat and pressure. Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.”

“If there’s a physical component to falling in love—the butterflies in your stomach, the roller coaster of your soul—then there’s an equal physical component to falling out of love. It feels like your lungs are sieves, so you can’t get enough air. Your insides freeze solid. Your heart becomes a tiny, bitter pearl, a chemical reaction to one irritating grain of truth.”

“...when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.”