Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don’t have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?
She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn’t sure who’d broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.
She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn’t going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn’t going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.
He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.
Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.
It was wrong. But it was worth it.
You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.
She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?
The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched.
You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It’s you who makes me a person.
You’ll turn out ordinary if you’re not careful.
I love you, I’ll never stop.
Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.
You just have to let people love you in the way they can.
Wish for what you want, work for what you need. -Carmen’s grandmother.
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
If you didn’t have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn’t have options, you made some. You couldn’t just let this world happen to you... he didn’t see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and this one slim chance.
Maybe the truth is there’s a little bit of loser in all of us you know, being happy isn’t having everything in your life being perfect. Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things. Making those count more then the bad stuff. Maybe we just get through it and that’s all we can ask for.
You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this... Ready? At least I tried.
You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel.