Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you...

Bridget’s anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.

I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can’t make yourself love someone, can you?

She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn’t have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in...

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball...

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with...

He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her...

Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn’t change the past. The past was set and sealed.

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...

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn’t get to...

Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.

He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the...

Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and I’ll show you a girl who can’t put her pants on.-Annik Marchand

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn’t her parents’ and it wasn’t her friends: It was her own.

The path of your life can change in an instant.

Someday when you’re twenty, maybe, I’ll see you again. You’ll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what?...

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...