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"When I sleep, I dream of you, and when I wake, I long to hold you in my arms. If anything, our time apart has only made me more certain that I want to spend my nights by your side, and my days with your heart."

Where does a story truly start? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet these are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen

"My mom used to tell me that whatever you do, marry someone who loves you more than you love him."

She'd always believed that people come in two varieties: those who look out the windshield and those who stare in the rearview mirror. She'd always been the windshield type: Gotta focus on the future, not the past, because that's the only part that's still up for grabs.

"Mitch...was the kind of man who added something to everything he touched and everyone he came in contact with. I was envious of his view on life. He saw it all as a big game, where the only way to win was to be good to other people, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see."

"No," his father replied, "you ran for you. I just hope you're running toward something, not away from something."

"...The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it's over. Those two elements always go together. … The best we can hope for in life is that it doesn't happen for a long, long time."

Nowadays, she thought, it was the little things in life that mattered. If the highlights in her past set the tone, it was the day-by-day events that now defined who she was.

"I don't want to be a grown-up. … Because grown-ups always say that things are complicated."

"Loving someone and having them love you back is the most precious thing in the world. It's what made it possible for me to go on..."

...feeling her helplessness. There was nothing worse. Most people lived under the illusion that they were in control of their lives, but that wasn't completely true. Yeah, you could decide what to have for breakfast and what to wear and all those little things, but as soon as you stepped out into the world, you were pretty much at the mercy of everyone else around you, and all you could do was hope that if they were having a bad day, they wouldn't decide to take it out on you.

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.