The Tenth Circle

~What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

~All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.

~What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

~It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't. 

~Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be rescued.

~The saddest day in the world will be the one when I stop pretending.

~He called dreams a 'royal road' into the unconscious, made up of all forbidden wishes you had and you wished you didn't

~As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

~You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if  your child was the one who burned it in the first place.

~But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted to bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.

~She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

~It was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

~The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.

~It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.

~There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.

~She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.

~Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons.

~But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

~...he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter. She turned to stare out the window, lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which Danielle could guess. These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences.

~Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?

~It was simply what happened when the histories of two people dovetailed into one.

~It was the sort of place where you could hear the tumblers of your mind falling into place as you pieced thought together, as you tried to match it to action.

~There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.

~How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were?

~And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.

~Is there anything more solid, more right, than knowing you child was where she ought to be?

~She knew all sorts of four letter words now; they just weren't the ones that most people considered foul language.
Love.
Help.
Rape.
Stop.
Then.

~How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I dont look like me?

~And yet, you never knew what you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.

~These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

~There was a fine line between love and hate you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You'd fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness one day to feel like an intrusion.

~What you notice is the loneliness.

~Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away.

~Given anything negative or uncertain, there were rules that had to be followed.

~I guess it's just so I remember where I started.

~A villain let your creativity out of its cage. The problem was, you couldn't have one without the other. There couldn't be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn't be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.

~The catch was this: Power always involved loss of humanity.

~His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he had become in order to save her.

~Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting you hadn't completely given up.

~Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?

~There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them.

~Your child is hurt. How quickly can you make it better?
What if you can't?

~Danger came in different packages, at different points in a lifetime.

~Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?

~They were different places in that same relationship, and like anything that's out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later.

~What Trixie wanted, most of all, what she couldn't have - to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

~May be the question we need to ask isn't whether there's any fresh twenty first century sin...but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.

~Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence.

~Silence was just a quieter way to lie.

~The age wasn't as important as the milestones.

~She wondered how big the world was, really, when you crossed it, instead of traced it with your finger on the map.

~Who would have imagine that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?

~Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?

~The problem with marriage - or may be its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later.

~Until then she hadn't considered that there was a trade off, that she might not fit anymore in places where she'd been comfortable.

~We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

~How could you pick, knowing that you'd have to go home and live with the choice you made?

~May be you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.

~It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us did a better job of hiding it than others.

~If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it's a mistake and may be see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.

~May be it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.

~If she was getting anywhere on this journey, it was still the wrong way.

~She pictured how it would feel to trust your instincts in a strange land, to know the difference between where you had been and where you were going.

~Because the more you changed, the less of you there was. What she couldn't put into word was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other 

~...as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head... or may be just your old ones, minus the hope.

~People move too fast and talk too much, and before you know it, they come back to a place they don't want to be - except now they know there's nowhere left to run.

~Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.

~It was a hairline crack, one might never have noticed, except for the fact it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them.

~A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?