Kate Le Vann

“I didn’t want to give him anything. I was quite happy without boyfriend trouble.”

“Not knowing why is the hardest part.”

“Being brave is not a part of yourpersonality, it’s your job. It’s what you owe the people who love you.”

“Well, you get to know yourself better. You write about events when they happen to you, but then later you can read what you said about them, and enough time has passed for you to not remember exactly how you were feeling at the time, and you can see where you’ve gone wrong, or right. It’s always surprising—your attitude always changes. Maybe it was a huge deal at the time and now you have no idea why it upset you.”

“I need to move on and take chances whenthey find me. To be fearless even if it means getting hurt again.”

“I'm scared of using the few memories I have and turning them into memories of memories, like songs you've played too many times, and you feel just a bit less excited by each time.”

“She left me at the worst possible time because I knew her enough to know I was completely in love with her, but she didn't leave me with enough memories.”

“I've just got to keep going and hope that one day, it starts to feel not quite as bad as it does now.”

“It's weird how you think you've got your life sussed and then it flips over and all your priorities change.”

“Hearts don't really get broken, but if you practice too hard with them, they can get quite hurt. It feels like they won't get better, but they do.”

“Maybe I just left it too late, and things changed too much for us to go back to where we were.”

“I don't know if you ever get over having your heart broken.”

“People don't always tell you the truth about how they feel.”

“When we talk now, we both know we've lost something, and I can feel us trying to fake it and make up what's missing. The faking makes me sad, and the sadness makes the faking harder to do.”

“The hardest part is being brave so that nobody knows that you are sad all the time.”

“I came to realize that it hadn’t really been up to me to chase after him. It had been Luke’s choice not to staywith me.”

“The truth hurts because it's the shit that everyone kept from you.”

“When you've got a real boyfriend, everything stupid is okay, and everything scary feels safe.”

“Nothing that happens between two people is guaranteed to be private.”

“Unrequited love is like buying a dress that you can’t fit into but you promise yourself you’ll diet for—you can’t think about the dress, only about the fact that your body is too big for it.”

“Well,” Adam said, leaning back and sighing, “I’ve got that out of my system now. I can leave you alone for the rest of the day. I always say, if you kiss the girl at the start of the date, it takes the pressure off.” “Oh, really, is that what you always say?” I said.“Always. It’s my golden rule. I’ve literally been saying it since…since I met you again in Princeton. Well, I suppose it came a bit after that. I’vedefinitely been saying it all morning.”

“In my experience, a lot of the boys who are real computer-heads tend to be pale-skinned sci-fi fans. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I happen to be a pale-skinned sci-fi fan myself—but that doesn’t mean I have to fancy other seethrough geeks.So let’s hope Adam isn’t as picky as me.”

“The introduction was meant to be all important and elegant and meaningful and “This summer marks the voyage of discovery of Livia Stowe,” and instead all I’m doing is writing about the plane crashing and when they find my laptop the only message I’ll have left for my loved ones and the good of humanity is “Oh, noooooo, we’re all going to die! It was the turkeys!” They will know that I knew about the loose bit on the wing. And didn’t tell anyone. Okay, everything’s smoothing out again now. The flap is still flapping, but we’ve made it through the flying turkeys, and the plane has stopped bumping. The flight attendants still don’t seem bothered, so I think maybe I’m not going to die today.”

“Because falling in love, even when it's unrequited, is not something that happens to only one person. The other person can't help getting involved, whether they like it or not.”

“When our eyes made contact it was like being slapped, I just wanted to recoil”

“I was too proud to show him how hurt I was.”