I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be.

Nobody wants to believe that existence carries on without at least taking a stumble from their departure of this world.

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity.

You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.

If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with—and vice versa—the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.

Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last.

Butt holes are like a one-way street; they were made the way they were for a reason.

College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.