"The reality was, you only knew you were loved if you were left and returned to, if you were ignored and then craved. Occasionally you would be seen for slightly less than the sum of your parts, and that was love, too. Love announced itself with a sting, not a pat. If love was love, it was urgent and ripe and carried with it the faint odor of humiliation, so that there was always something to be made up for later, some apology in the works." - The Brutal Language of Love

"I'd feel horrible, my heart would ache and it would do that unnerving breathless thing where it quivers and you feel as if your heart actually has the capacity to tremor that rapidly upon subconscious will but I .. or at least I try not to let anyone have that amount of control over me because I think that only God should have that. No mortal should have that kind of power." - Kirsten Kirsten. Eighteen. Child of God.