Martina Boone

“Family is always a mirror. You can hide from other people, you can even hide from yourself, but your family is going to reflect what you’re doing right back at you.”

“Things, and people, were always more beautiful when you were afraid to lose them.”

“It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them.”

“Learning to love yourself is easier when you have someone to show you how.”

“You're asking me to look into the future and give you guarantees. Magic isn't a recipe for baking cake.”

“It occurred to her that all the bad parts of life, the sad parts, the frightening ones, were meant to be offset by moments and memories like this. She had to be present in it, right here, right now.”

“Hope is possibly the only inexhaustible resource on earth.”

“You didn’t find strength when you couldn’t live without it. You found it when you had someone or something you loved so much that it forced you to stretch the edges of yourself further than you thought was possible.”

“Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.”

“The hardest part of changing things is knowing how much needs changing,”

“Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.”

“Fighting to protect the people you cared for was one thing. Trusting someone you loved to fight for themselves took a different kind of strength and bravery.”

“Dreams shape the kind of human beings we become. Not having a dream gave me a smaller future and made me a smaller person.”

“In so many ways, for so many people, freedom was still an illusion. Barrie thought of the statistics she had read about how many women and children were still enslaved all over the world. Now— not three hundred years ago— and she wondered how it was possible that so little could change. Sometimes it seemed like the world was sliding backward and no one was noticing.”

“But there was a difference between being stuck and choosing to stay. Between being found and finding yourself.”

“You can’t have relationships if you’re not willing to open yourself up and lean on people as much as you want them to lean on you.”

“We've lost a lot of years, but you can't lose love. Not real love. It stays locked inside you, ready for whenever you are strong enough to find it again.”

“Pushing through fear was what eventually set you free.”

“Ultimately, wasn’t dance a whispered question? A story told through the position of a foot, the tilt of a head, the touch of a hand, the brush of an eye. A rite of passage. A claiming.”

“But the people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood.”