Quotes from Deb Caletti

It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It's just like Animal Planet, only we've got Cover Girl and Victoria's Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale.

Oh, every person is a book with chapters. Some are glorious and some are dark and ugly. Every person survives something.

Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.

She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes.

We're as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren't we? Maybe better.

You could care enough to keep a secret, but you could care enough to tell one, too.

Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you're at the end of the book, and it's only the end of a chapter.

Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel great distances away from you. You shouldn't think you needed to set out to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged. Sometimes they were only safe and happy, like Annabelle Aurora. And then other times, it was just possible they were lost at sea. It would be your duty, then, to get out into the boat and search, even if the waves were choppy and the wind was howling the protests of the dead.

But an apology too — you think you're giving something, but you're not. You're really asking for something. You're asking for forgiveness, you're asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.

This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling...I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend's house without giving mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere "Have fun, honey.

Look right at it. Know you can." Dad said. "Look right at that fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter.

Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.

I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.

Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

A lot of life is just surviving what happens.

The hurt affects your ability to go forward.

Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

It's the people who know you and love you that save you.

No, Mom. I said fine." "It's just your tone." Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor.

You … You had always made the future feel safe. As long as you were in it too, beside me, I could be okay.

I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations...Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.