some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn’t real.

There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn’t quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you...

The weather turned. Her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want...

Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got...

…he had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it. Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that...

I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I’ve learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand...

she looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn’t have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells...

You know what the secret is? It’s so simple. We love one another. We’re nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? – Carmen

Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms.

Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.

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...

Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.

When you open yourself to somebody, when you feel these thing that you feel, well, what do you do? You can try to ignore it, maybe you can try to forget about it, but you...

There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.

A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.

Healing wasn’t always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after...

It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren’t ready, when you were just...

He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more...

In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt read. What happened to me by myself felt partly...

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.

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.