“I want to be someone strong and brave enough to make hard choices. But I want to be fair and loving enough to make the right ones.”

“But I want to be better than the lessons they taught me. I want my love to be greater that my hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance.”

“Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.”

“I want to be someone strong and brave enough to make hard choices. But I want to be fair and loving enough to make the right ones.”

“How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is?”

“I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.”

“Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.”

“Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.”

“The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore.”

“Life is one sick joke after another, I'm discovering. Because it hardly seems fair that it should hurt so much to finally get exactly what I've been wishing for.”

“No one controls who we turn into but us.”