“Hazel could not explain that she had forgotten, that there was Jack and soul-sucking villains, and sometimes you are too scratchy to remember the things you are supposed to do, even if you do feel really bad about it later.”

“She looked up. "What I can't figure out is why the good things always end.""Everything ends.""Not some things. Not the bad things. They never go away.""Yes, they do. If you let them, they go away. Not as fast as we'd like sometimes, but they end too. What doesn't end is the way we feel about each other. Even when you're all grown up and somewhere else, you can remember what a good time we had together. Even when you're in the middle of bad things and they never seem to be changing, you can remember me. And I'll remember you.”

“Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren’t even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong.”

“How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.”

“I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.”

“Kissing Jack wasn't what he'd expected. Not letting himselfdo it for this long now seemed kind of stupid ... or a lotstupid. What had he been afraid of? Too intimate, tooromantic, too ... just too. Sex was okay, even sucking dickwas okay. That was to get off. Kissing, though ... that you didonly because you had something to say that words didn'tquite do it for. That meant feelings and messiness.”