Quotes from Donna Freitas

Why is it that when we lose something big, we begin to lose everything else along with it?

It's difficult to stop trying with the one you love. You always hope that this next time might work, might change everything for the better.

Life was fragile and love was, too. At any moment, even our happiest ones, our world could shatter and we wouldn't see it coming. There was only more loss ahead, showing its ugly face when we least expected it.

Yet little by little, I was also becoming the girl who was learning to live with this, all of it, letting it weave together with everything else, the good and the bad, as life moved forward, because that's what life did, regardless of whether we were ready for it or not.

I've barely been able to think about anything else.' 'Other than...' He waited for me to finish. 'Kissing you, dummy,' I said. 'Really?' 'You shouldn't be that surprised,' I said. He grinned. 'I'm just glad to know we're on the same page.

The girl I am now, this girl--she survived. I just needed a little help getting here.

The only thing that mattered was where I was and who I was with now, and when Will's arms tightened around me I knew I was right where I needed to be all along.

So what are you saying?" he asked. "That we'd be crazy if we don't try again. That you are good for me, Will Doniger. You've proven it again and again." He hesitated before he turned to me, words hovering on his lips. "Tell me," I said. "What are you thinking?" "That I love you, Rose. I have for a while." I stopped breathing. "Me too. I love you, too.

To create a community where faith matters not just in theory but in reality, faith has to be a public value, not just a private one.

The happier people become the more I noticed my sadness.

I guess you could say my mind was injured and that's why I didn't play.

How quickly the brain, the body adapts to this new presence in life; how quickly the brain, the body develops a sense for it, for her--the ebb and flow of Addie's nearness and farness, the awareness of her location, her safety, her comfort and well-being.

My love for Addie is terrifying, a perpetual state of vertigo, an ongoing condition of living on the edge of an abyss.

I am a survivor, but I also am, and always will be, a victim. I can't speak for others who share this dual identity, but I can say for myself that, while I wish to be the proud person who exclusively occupies the title of survivor, I still claim the territory of the shivering, cowering victim.

Was he going to ask me to go with him? Maybe I was getting ahead of myself and he was just making conversation. Oh, why was talking to a boy so fraught with complication?

Gymnasts develop fears about certain moves and get hang-ups about doing routines at meets or anxiety about certain rivals who can psych them out.

There were just little things and they still made me sad, but I become better at staying in my sadness and at resisting the urge to chase it away.

I thought about love as we stood there, the day turning to dusk and the temperature dropping, and my heart, the one inside of me, become fuller.

I would work my way toward the Rose from before, who laughed often, who felt things so deeply, who could move through the world brimming with feeling and emotion.

I devised a list of things I needed to accomplish, all of them related to the Survival Kit and my mother. I was no longer going in any particular order or interpreting my tasks so literally and narrowly. They took on a life of their own, a life that I was giving them now.

The girl I am now, this girl-she survived. I just needed a little help getting here.

It's difficult to stop trying with the one you love. You always hope that this next time might work, might change everything for the better.

Music hadn`t always deepened my grief. For most of my sixteen years, it had healed my hurts, soothed them, given me a way to remember and the strength to move on.

it never occurred to me that the girl I`d always been in high school could bend and shift and change without breaking altogether!