It's hard to love yourself when you've been told your whole life that there is something wrong with you - when you are called dirty because of your skin color.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.

It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone... but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.

There's a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, "Let me take care of you forever," and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I'd given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely.

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment - and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning.