“ 'It's much easier to destroy a life than it is to live one.' ”

“That's what hiding away did, whether it was from the world or yourself, your past, or even your dreams. It took absolutely no effort to have a miserable life. But building a glorious one? A life worth living and sharing with others? That's what was hard." Joanna”

“But no life was without it's strain & strife, not if it was fully lived. Opening up to experience, even the good ones like trust & love, was to open yourself up to the pain. I suppose the key was to not compound matters by making the rest of it unnecessarily hard. My need for control had certainly done that in the past. So I made a promise to myself in that moment. I would make a concerted effort to reach for what was soft & good in this world. I'd find a place to settle into, and hold still so that this world's good and soft could reach back & touch me as well.”

“ 'I scrape under a nail and I pull out dirt. I pull off an overlay and I smell urine. It's the rot of their lives seeping into their nailbeds, you see? They can fix their hair and paint their nails and run on a treadmill until they're anorexia's poster child, but they can't fix their lives...lives of rotting perfection.' ”

“...lovers, even those who are married, always exist autonomously of one another, no matter how close they are or how long they've known each other. That's why jealously can flare in even the most intimate relationships. Because you know that at some basic level this person exists separately from you. No mater how close you are, the landscape of their life is always tinted a different hue than your own." - Hunter to Joanna”

“Now her life was under attack, and she [Kit] was shocked to find how fragile everything she'd built really was. She was dumbfounded, too to find that while people were being ripped from her life like paper dolls from a chain, she longed to be the one who'd be gone first.”

“So much to say, yet no words would ever be enough.”