How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when...

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she’d forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.

Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives,...

When she made her way to the big picture window that framed the dining room table she froze. She stopped breathing. The anger was growing again.It grew up into her throat, where she could taste...

I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.

She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things

But I know this. We’re ready to move forward again in our way. Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the...

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn’t sure who’d broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.

Honesty was a tough customer… Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn’t easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once...

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time

Maybe the truth is, there’s a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn’t having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things.

She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was...

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She’d held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even,...

Let me love you, but don’t love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.

This is the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. I you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want.

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...

Maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the...

Not everyone got a close family. Not everyone needed one.

How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?”Eudoxia’s expression grew more serious. “That’s what you’re doing anyway, my dear.

Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I’d share you, but I told him to remember that you’re my sister. I loved you first. (Riley...

Love who you love while you have them. That’s all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you’ll never run out.

Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.

Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn’t get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of...

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight—at least as the normally experienced them.

I’m afraid of time… I mean, I’m afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I’m afraid of the quick judgements or...

She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she’d realized...

sometimes you need to make a mess.

It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.

She’d cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn’t feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just … empty. It felt like she was...

Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited...

When you feel someone else’s pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

We’re the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don’t need to say so; it’s just true. Sometimes it seems like we’re so close we form one single complete person...

But it was smell that carried memory.

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

When she is happy, she can’t stop talking, when she is sad she doesn’t say a word.

She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.

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...

If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.