“This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.”

“If a summer were a girl, she'd always be lying stretched out in the grass in a long white dress, her arms over her head, her eyes half closed.”

“Always pick the thing that is not a chain, is one way to try to save the world.”

“In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.”

“But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.”

“One thing I have always been is too short. It's adorable when you're in junior high. After that, it's a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.”

“She put her hand over her heart. Oh boy. It hurts. It's a real pain. Right here.”