Elizabeth Brundage

You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't.

As corny as it sounds, Gallagher said, life is very long. You're supposed to mess up when you're young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes-as you did in this case. But things rarely stay the same. People grow up and change. They move on.

Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

Her mother had told her that when she was a girl. Whenever you__e in trouble, just remember you__e your own best friend.

It__ hard to see what__ good, what__ right, when you__e in the middle of it

Things didn't really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.