“Astonishingly, not all girls get dressed just to please men.”

You decided what you thought you’d like me to do, and you went ahead and did it. You did what everyone else does. You decided for me.

Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere.

I told him I loved him,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And he just said it wasn’t enough.” Her eyes were wide and bleak . “How am I supposed to live with that?

Just live well. Just live

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me.

Just hold on. Just for a minute.” “Are you all right ?” I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.

How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death?

You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.

I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.