"Don’t you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you’ve made, every hurt you’ve received, every bit of meanness you’ve dealt out? There’s no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep."

"There are a lot of lies that people tell each other and themselves; I hate to be the one to point it out but one of this lies is: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” What’s true is: what doesn’t hurt you makes you stronger. But what hurts you, well, that just hurts you."

"The thing that hurts the most is the fact that I lied to myself. I wanted things to be good so badly that I made up things to gloss over the bad parts. I know that sounds stupid, but that’s exactly what I did. I actually believed it too. To want is a bad thing sometimes. It gets people hurt. It got me hurt. The world is a lonely place and people will go to great lengths to find someone whom they can be with. Someone who doesn’t think that they’re a creep. Just wanting to be able to talk to someone, that want will make you do some nasty things to yourself."

"You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have a say in who hurts you."

"No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for - and to do it so unconsciously."

"Dear Frank,
How I wish I could hug everyone and tell them it’s ok. It’s ok to be scared and angry and hurt and selfish. It’s part of being human."

"She didn’t understand that. “How can anyone be afraid of love?” “How can they not?” His face was completely aghast. “When you love someone…truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt—you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it’s crippling—like having your heart carved out. It leaves you naked and exposed, wondering what you did to make them want to hurt you so badly when all you did was love them. What is so wrong with you that no one can keep faith with you? That no one can love you? To have it happen once is bad enough, but to have it repeated? Who in their right mind would not be terrified of that?"

"You do the shittiest things to the people you love the most. That’s just the way it is. You always hurt the people you care about most."

"That’s life. If nothing else, its life. It’s real, and sometimes it fucking hurts, but it’s sort of all we have."

"Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either, but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me."

"So maybe it doesn’t really matter if you wear your heart on your sleeve or if you lock it up in a box away from the world, because in the end, everyone gets hurt."

"You can always say sorry, but the real apology is when you hear the sadness in their voice and see the look in their eyes and you realize that they have hurt themselves just as much."

"It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to be unsure. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to hurt. It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to feel beauty. It’s okay to be yourself. If it’s not okay now, it’s going to be. That I promise."

"Waves of feeling began surging out, one after another, from the place where they had been dammed up. Death isn’t sad. What hurts is being drowned by all these emotions. I want to run away, I thought - to escape this distant autumn sky."

"We are all hurt, and we all ache, and we think that we’re so different from everyone else, that we are so special, that our pain is so special. But really, does it matter? Because we all hurt, we all ache, we all feel the pain, but that doesn’t make anyone else’s pain matter any less."