“keep in mind that even those who love you can unknowningly inflict pain when they themselves are hurting”

“Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back . . . then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else.”

“How can I fault her for trying to bury a truth that when exposed to air and sunlight could only hurt the ones she loves?”

“The words just sprang into my mind. Maybe I'd never stopped loving Michael, but now it felt different. I loved him despite the injuries we'd inflicted on one another, because of the bad times as well as the good ones..... Our love was richer and bumpier and more complex than it had ever been before.”

“If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it—to love it. Some endure it through drowning it in sorrow, or by making themselves forget. Others turn it into anger. But Ansel let her pain become hate, and let it consume her until she became something else entirely—a person I don’t think she ever wished to be”

“I was beginning to see, though, that the unknown wasn't always the greatest thing to fear. The people who know you best can be risker, because the words they say and things they think have the potential to be not only scary but true, as well.”

“You know, when a person is murdered, you can miss that person and put all of your anger into hating the killer, even if you don‘t know who the killer is. You also have the choice of forgiveness. But when someone takes her own life, she is the killer.”