Ann Brashares

“She'd never felt about anyone the way she'd felt about him. Not even close. 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 the doing that was painful.”

“he occupied an alternate universe that intersected nowhere with hers. He no longer represented someday, a possibility. He represented a road not taken, a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn't see where it went anymore.”

“d it was true she experienced even the strongest pleasures and poignancies down pretty deep. They tended not to make it all the way up to her face. [Lena]”

“They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.”

“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 having to feel it for you right back.”

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

“It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.”

“If you didn't have a choice, you have to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let the world happen to you.”

“Thoughts were nothing. Memories were nothing. They were nothing you could touch. They took no time. You could fit them all on the point of a pin. You could bring your entire world into doubt in a span of a few seconds.”

“At the worst possible moment, the most painful, darkest moment when you can't take it anymore and you are afraid, that is when a feeling of peace and comfort will come over you, and it's like nothing you've ever felt.”

“I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.”

“He could lose himself in her forever, he thought.”

“It wasn't meant to work with them, was it? He didn't know if he could try anymore.”

“No matter how it felt to be near him, she had to keep her swollen heart in check.”

“but it was hard to give the real world much notice when he was this close.”

“I did love her. I've loved her from the first time I saw her.”

“In this present body he hadn't been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself.”

“Because the truth wouldn't be comforting and wouldn't bring them closer again.”

“He didn't want to go forward, but he always wanted to get another chance.”

“She'd loved him as much as he'd let her. More than he'd let her.”

“She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew.”

“Why couldn't it belong to him anymore? Why couldn't he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.”

“Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.”

“She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was.”

“I can't wait for you forever, she found herself thinking as she lay in bed most mornings, thinking about her dreams, waiting for her alarm to ring.”

“Because they forgot and I remembered. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves.”

“He could take happiness from her, but could he give any?”

“Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.”

“She was supposed to be putting her life together right now, and all she could seem to do was throw grenades at it.”

“Maybe they would look at each other and feel some odd yearning, but neither of them would know why. They would want to stop, but they would be embarrassed, and neither would know what to say. They would go their separate ways. Who knew? Maybe that happened every day to people who'd once loved each other.”

“There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn't work the way you or most other people thought it did.”

“This body is breaking down, but I am not.”

“Pain is fear, and I'm not afraid.”

“All I could think to do was love her. That's all a person can do.”

“You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.”

“But we were in the same place at the same time in our lives, and for that alone I was inexpressibly buoyant and a few hundred years' worth of grateful.”

“I've always feared she would find completion without me, and I'd be around, stupid and unperfected, forever.”

“He just wanted to look at her and know her life was marching along under the same arch of time and space as he is.”

“We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.”

“I felt like a pianist who'd been forced to play on a few white keys in the middle, finally allowed to run his hands all up and down the keyboard.”

“Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today.”

“When we stopped to eat in the midday, 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.”

“His power over her was limited, because she didn't love him.”

“I guess I was better at loving then, too, and also better at being loved — the two go together.”

“But certain souls cohere. It's rare but possible. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so.”

“Or was he the romantic fiction of a girl who'd been desperate for a handsome stranger to come along?”

“I wondered if I was an error of God's planning that would be fixed at the end of my life.”

“You should find him because he loves you.”

“He'd given up blessings he hadn't been worthy of for the chance to be with her, and now he'd lost that, too.”

“Why did he keep going when everyone else got to start over?”