My mother says it can’t stay like this, but I believe it will. The Pants are like an omen. They stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together. But they stand for a challenge too. It’s not enough to stay in Bethesda, Maryland, and hunker down in air-conditioned houses. We promise one another that someday we’d get out in the world and figure some stuff out.
The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was the opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. – Winston Churchill.
It was amazing, really, the effort that went into the absence of things.
Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but never made progress.
She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn’t. You didn’t know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn’t know how strong you were.
It was a strange thing about college. You felt like you were supposed to be finding your life there. Each person you saw, you thought, “Will you mean something to me? Will we figure into each other’s lives?
What was powerful at thirteen and seventeen should have grown quaint by twenty-four, and yet the covenant, by its nature had durability. It still existed between them. He could feel it even now. You could go away for months and years, but it was still here, bound to what you loved, binding you to it.
Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn’t want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueller paradoxes of human nature.
Girls who wouldn’t take risks both loved and hated girls who did. Bridget.
Fine, blood was thicker than water. But friendship, it struck Tibby, was thicker than both.
She wished she could swap her days for her nights, her reality for her dreams.
That seemed a sad thing about human nature – how much more time we spend thinking about what we don’ have, or have lost, than about what we have.
She could understand and analyze and predict the exact outcome of her crazy, self-destructive behavior and then go ahead and do it anyway.
She could sit here and cry for as long as she liked. She could crawl under the desk. She could run around in the parking lot. She could live big. She could make herself to do things that were hard. She could.
Your chances of getting hit by lightning go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say “Storms suck!” – Johnny carson.
She had that frustrating dreamlike confusion of racking her brain for the answer then forgetting what the question was. There was a question, wasn’t there?
Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly.
There are some people who fall in love over and over.” Tibby nodded, understanding the particular melancholy as it revealed itself on Lena’s face. “And there are others who can only seem to do it once.
She didn’t open the envelope until she’d gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn’t given her the thousand dollars she’d asked for-he’d given her ten thousand.