“I wasn't sure who I was most scared of at the moment. The stranger I was learning about too quickly, or the woman I'd known my entire life that was quickly becoming a stranger.”

“Funny hoe everything can change in an instant. From death to life. From empty to full. From darkness to light. Or maybe I just wasn't looking. I hadn't known that light could be a feeling and sound could be a color and a kiss could be both a question and an answer. And that heaven could be the ocean or a person or this moment or something else entirely.”

“We were in a pit. Fitting. This was, after all, my hell. This pit around the lake. The lake that had taken so much. My friendship with Decker. My humanity. Quite nearly my life. And I was so angry with it. I wasn't scared anymore. I was furious.”

“I hadn't known that a light could be a feeling and a sound could be a color and a kiss could be both a question and an answer. And that heaven could be the ocean or a person or this moment or something else entirely.”

“The first time I died, I didn't see God. No light at the end of the tunnel. No haloed angels. No dead grandparents. To be fair, I probably wasn't a solid shoo-in for Heaven. But, honestly, I kind of assumed I'd make the cut.”

“I wasn't athletic and had no desire to work out, so I watched what I ate. Correction: I ate what I wanted and felt guilty about it later.”

“I knew how I was supposed to feel when I was with him. Well, I knew what I was not supposed to feel. I wasn't supposed to feel anxious. Not tense, either. Or maybe I was. Maybe this was normal. I didn't know. So I let him whisper in my ear and put his hands on my hips. And I listened to him list the ways in which I was slowly killing him. None of which turned out to be the actual way that I killed him.”