"Well, it's New Year's now but I don't feel that way anymore. I wonder if you do either. Something's happening to me. It's like I'm shrinking smaller and smaller and I can't stop it. There's just so much wrong that I can't imagine the shame in admitting even the tiniest part of it. When you left it was like there was this huge gap to fill, but instead of spreading wide enough to do it I just fell right in, and I'm still falling. Like I'm half-asleep, and I can't wake up, can't wake up...."

"And that was as far as he got before i heard it. The thumping of footsteps, running up the lawn toward me: It seemed like I could hear it through the grass, like leaning your ear to a railroad track and feeling the train coming, miles away. As the noise got closer I could hear ragged breaths, and then a voice."

"There were moments - when Jeopardy came on, in the car during radio trivia challenges, or for practically any question I couldn't answer in any subject - that Rogerson simply amazed me. I started to seek out facts, just to stump him, but it never worked. He was that sharp."

"If there's one thing I've learned in the last few months, it's that sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump."

"It was my mother."

"I had this wild thought that he was the only one in all this chaos who was just like me, and that was comforting and profound all at once."

"Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids. I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again, pulling me upward into light,to drown."

"It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself."

"What was the name of Pygmalion's sister?"

"Hey Cass, I'd say, hand me that toothpaste."

"Caitlin, she'd say, her voice dark and serious. I can't hand you the toothpaste. But I CAN help you hand the toothpaste to yourself."

"She blinked, twice, obviously surprised. Ummm, she said, keeping her eyes on me. I don't know."

"And she was good to me: strong, fun, and fiercely loyal. And if I didn't have many other friends because of her-most girls were intimidated by her looks, or thought she was too pushy, or just flat-out feared for their boyfriends-it never bothered me. I never missed having a wide, thick circle of girlfriends: Rina was more than enough. We were comfortable with each other's flaws and weaknesses, so we stuck together and kept to ourselves."

"Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away."

"After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did."

"I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. We can't heal you at Evergreen, the very somber voiceover said. But we can help you to heal yourself. It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything."

"I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself for the next hit, and feel something. Something grainy and small, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park."

"During this time we've been apart, it's you I've thought of when I'm at my weakest, and you who have pulled me through."

"I wondered again why the right thing always seemed to be met with so much resistance, when you'd think it would be the easier path. You had to fight to be virtuous..."

"Are you ever going to show me the painting?""

"I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I'd slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm's length, behind a closed door, miles away."

"Man," he said. "You are, like, so impatient.""

"I've given lots of people chances, she said suddenly, as if Marion was still in the room to hear us. But there's only so much faith you can have in people."

"And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way."

"I am not," I said. "I've been waiting forever.""

"When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting."

"There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand."

"You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place."

"Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend."

"You can't just turn your heart off like a faucet; you have to go to the source and dry it out, drop by drop."

"My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest. page 40000"

"I watched my mother do what she did best, and realized there would never be a way to cut myself from her entirely. No matter how strong or weak I was, she was a part of me, as crucial as my own heart. I would never be strong enough, in all my life, to do without her."

"Okay, okay." He stood up and went over to the corner, picking up the painting and bringing it over to rest against the bright pink belly of one of the mannequins. Then, he handed me a bandana. "Tie that on.”"

"At every wedding someone stays home."

"Maybe not, she said as we came to the car. But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works."

"It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine."

"It was just perfect, just right all at once."

"Why?" I said, but I did it anyway. "Norman, you are way too into ceremony.""

"It's important." I could hear him moving around, adjusting things, before he came to sit beside me. "Okay," he said. "Take a look.""

"I was worn out, broken: He had taken almost everything. But he'd been all I'd had, all this time. And when the police led him away, I pulled out of the hands of all these loved one, sobbing, screaming, everything hurting, to try and make him stay."

"I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't."

"And a proverb haunts my mind As a spell is cast, "The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.""

"But the waiting time, my brothers, Is the hardest time of all."

"I send thee pansies while the year is young, Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night; Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light."

"The pure, the beautiful, the bright, That stirred our hearts in youth, The impulse to a wordless prayer, The dreams of love and truth, The longings after something lost, The spirit’s yearning cry, The strivings after better hopes,— These things can never die."

"Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear."

"Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and Fellows and that the RSL is not a political body [...] This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is their own Society."

"The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days."

"When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled…It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase."

"Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted."