Stephenie Meyer

This was the problem with hanging out with vampires — you got used to them. They started messing up the way you saw the world. They started feeling like friends.

"Don't be afraid," I muttered. "We belong together."

I was abruptly overwhelmed by the truth of my own words. This moment was so perfect, so right, there was no way to doubt it.

I wondered if I was a monster. Not the kind that [Edward] thought he was, but the real kind. The kind that hurt people. The kind that had no limits when it came to what they wanted.

"You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault. [...] You didn't choose this kind of life, and yet you have to work so hard to be good."

"I don't know that I'm making up for anything," he disagreed lightly. "Like everything in life, I just had to decide what to do with what I was given."

"[W]hen I left you, Bella, I left you bleeding. Jacob was the one to stitch you back up again. That was bound to leave its mark — on both of you. I'm not sure those kinds of stitches dissolve on their own."

I was like a lost moon — my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation — that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

"Twilight, again. Another ending. No matter how perfect the day is, it always has to end."

Once you cared about a person, it was impossible to be logical about them anymore.

"For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours … all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet."

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

One thing I truly knew — knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest — was how love gave someone the power to break you.

I had been broken beyond repair.

"Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars — points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything."