Jodi Lynn Anderson: Herring

“To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together.”

“There was no twinkle in his eyes.
"Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough."
Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn't understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn't work that way.”

“Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was.”

“Maybe all of her strangeness, her curse, her always feeling like an outsider, had all existed so that she could belong here, with Peter.”

“He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched her facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore read Tiger Lily better than anyone else.”

“It didn't fit her ideas of who was bad, and who was good, and what was a happy ending, and what wasn't.”

“She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.”

“Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair”

“And always, I could see that, despite his weakness for her or because of it, he seemed uncatchable, as if he might slip away at any moment.”

“It is just that she was fifteen once for the first time, and Peter walked across her heart and left his footprints there.”

“As they grew sloppier and less alert, the twins argued too loudly about whether Tiger Lily was ugly or beautiful, and finally agreed that she was "ugly beautiful".
Tiger Lily pretended she hadn't heard, but her heart slowed to absorb the blow.”

“Tiger Lily drifted down underneath herself. This was her one gift more than any other. Silently, she nodded. "Yes. Everything is more than okay.”