“It is not easy to explain how I felt while I read, but I will try. No doubt you, as a reader, will understand. It appeared I found myself in a place where no one could bother me, where no one could reach me. I grew impervious to all the noises around me.”

“At my very lowest, just when I believed unhappiness would eat me alive, I surrendered. I didn't suddenly become happy all at once; it took time. But I grew through the pain, grew to a place where I finally found understanding, and through understanding I found peace.”

“I felt as if I had gotten to the point where I could no longer trust myself. I was not the same person any longer. My whole genetic makeup had somehow been altered by him and I was a brand new person, one that was completely foreign to me.”

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

“I was suffocating even before we left the house, but no one bothered to ask me how I felt.”

“I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.”