I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother’sPTA and Boo’s strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,and led right to me.”She can be anything,” Boo told me,...

The truth was I knew, after all those flat January days, that I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a thousand expressions, and the warmth of a baby’s kick beneath my hand. I deserved to...

Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that’s what makes you strong.

Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

As I rolled over, stretching out, my only thought was to go back to the dream I’d been having, which I couldn’t remember, other than that it had been good, in that distant, hopeful way unreal things can be.

She smiled, pulling the photo a little closer, and I wondered if I should ask her, too, the question for my project, get her definition. But as she ran a finger slowly across the faces, identifying each one, it occurred to me that maybe this was her answer. All those names, strung together like beads...

I want the white one

That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened-good, bad, or anywhere in between-it was always, if nothing else, all your own.

It’s hard to do,” I said. Wes looked at me. “What is?” I swallowed, not sure why I’d said this out loud. “Get it right.

But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren’t what people wanted to hear.

It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.

Shit,” Delia said. “I mean, shoot. No, actually, I mean shit. I really do.

Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like...

It was amazing how you could get so far from where you’d planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.

for once, you believed in yourself. you believed you were beautiful and so did the rest of the world.

I don’t know,” I said. “What else did you do for your first eighteen years?””Like I said,” he said as I unlocked the car, “I’m not so sure that you should go by my example.””Why not?””Because I have my regrets,” he said. “Also, I’m a guy. And guys do different stuff.””Like ride bikes?” I said.”No,”...

Earlier in the summer, I’d found the syllabi to a couple of the courses I was taking at Defriese in the fall, and I’d hunted down a few of the texts at the U bookstore, figuring it couldn’t hurt to acquaint myself with the material.

He was not my boyfriend. On the other hand, he wasn’t just a friend either. Instead, our relationship was elastic, stretching between those two extremes depending on who else was around, how much either of us had to drink, and other varying factors. This was exactly what I wanted, as commitments had never really been...

My mother was strong, in all the ways I was weak. She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you will never know.

I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you get enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying.

Oh for God’s sake,’ Heather said, ‘I wish you two would just go out, fail miserably as a couple, and get it over with.

So you should remember that, when you’re thinking about what other people can deal with. Maybe it’s not so bad.

Isn’t it weird,” I said, “the way you remember things, when someone’s gone?”What do you mean?”I ate another piece of waffle. “When my dad first died, all I could think about was that day. It’s taken me so long to be able to think back to before that, to everything else.”Wes was nodding before I...

There were so many places in my time with Rogerson that I wished I could go back to, hitting the stop button at just one moment to stop everything that came after. I had so many If Onlys, but each place I thought to stop meant missing something that came later. I needed it all,...

I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.

the truth about forever is that it is happening right now

Look,” I said, “We knew Jason and Becky would be back, the break would end. This isn’t a surprise, it’s what’s supposed to happen. It’s what we wanted. Right?””Is it?” he asked. “Is it what you want?”Whether he intended it to be or not, this was the final question, the last Truth. If I said...

What you have to decide… is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you’d want to have spent it? Listen, the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody. So dont be afraid. Be alive.

Nunca habría sido capaz de decírselo, pero Owen me inspiraba. Las mentiras piadosas que yo decía a diario, las cosas que me guardaba, cada vez que no era sincera del todo… ahora me daba cuenta de eso. También era consciente de lo bien que me sentía al ser capaz de decirle a alguien lo que...

What you do in your dreams is never your choice. But it made me happy anyway.

It’s funny how two people can grow up in the same town, go to the same school, have the same friends, and end up so totally different. Family, or lack of it, counts for more than you’d think.

Silence is so freaking loud

Everything hurt. I closed my eyes, pressing my cheek to the street, and waited. What for, I didn’t know. To be rescued. Or found. But no one came. All I’d ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.

There’s something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. When you were tired of the radio and conversation, and it was okay to just be alone with your thoughts and the road ahead. If you’re that comfortable with someone, you don’t have to talk.

The choices you make now, the people you surround yourself with, they all have the potential to affect your life, even who you are, forever.

But what he didn’t understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm’s length or farther away. I understood those mermaids.I didn’t care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again,pulling me upward into light,to drown.

Fifteen minutes later, a meeting was called. “Okay, look.” Deb’s face was dead serious. “I know I just joined this project, and I don’t want to offend anyone. But I’m going to be honest. I think you’ve been going about this all wrong.” “I’m offended,” Dave told her flatly.

La música […] fue una vía de escape. Todo lo demás estaba cambiando o llegaba a su fin, pero la música era un recurso vasto, infinito.

Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn’t just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it.

Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine.

But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything, if only because I had no idea how to respond to such an overture. If my experience with friends was sparse, what I knew about boys- other than a competitors for grades or class rank- was nonexistent

Why does she have wings?’So she can fly.

If you didn’t love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go.

It seemed like this day could go in so many directions, like a spiderweb shooting out toward endless possibilities. Whenever you made a choice, especially one you’d been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change...

Fine,” he repeated, and I wondered why it was I kept coming back to this, again and again, a word that you said when someone asked how you were but didn’t really care to know the truth.

As Isabel acted out her date, both of them laughing, I stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and pretended she was telling me, too. And that, for once, I was part of this hidden language of laughter and silliness and girls that was, somehow, friendship.

Isn’t it weird the way you remember things, when someone’s gone?

Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.

Most people put off my mother’s erratic behavior to the fact that she was a writer, as if that just explained everything. To me that was just an excuse. I mean, brain surgeons can be crazy too, but no one says that’s all right. Fortunately for my mother, I am alone in this opinion.

Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like...