She couldn’t explain it except with the word: there. She was there. Present in herself. She wasn’t always, so it was worth remarking upon.

Get on with you, mooning about, wallowing in gooey sentiment. It doesn’t change anything.“It does, though,” said Tess, a blaze igniting in her heart, a blue flame. “Maybe the world isn’t really different, but I am different, and I am in the world.”Not just in it. She was it.

If you have a personality, you’re a person.

We try to do right, and we ... we ... they gang up on us, fear and pain and revenge and ... and then we find we’ve done wrong.

There’s a room in my heart full of unpaid bills. We all have one. It’s useful to go in occasionally and open a few.

Swept away was a fortuitous choice of words: it made her mad. She’d been swept away once—she’d let herself be, hoped and desired to be; that’s how it always went in romantic stories.She’d never be that passive again. It was far, far better to choose,

Light requires the high relief of darkness. Seeds sprout in darkness. Children are conceived, and the sun reborn. Death returns us to it. Darkness is not ... it’s not wrong.

People stood at the edge, gaping foolishly, because they didn’t believe it. The chasm was too big to understand.

What was rage but a cover for some secret fragility, some sorrow?