“I didn’t say a word. I just stared at him. I figured I didn’t owe him an answer, and I was too proud to even talk. I didn’t want to tell him a damn thing about me.”

“ I want to hold my breath for as long as it takes.I want to stop breathing just long enough to know what it would be like to be totally sitll. Like being a cough away from death.Not really there- not really here.”

“I think it was the one thing I didn’t like about him or about guys in general: when a girl says she doesn’t want to talk about it, the truth is that she usually does. I wanted him to pry it out of me. Of course, I would’ve pretended to be a little angry that he didn’t just leave me alone, but eventually I would’ve told him, when I was tired of pretending.”

“I think you need to go find that boy and tell him how you feel about him. Then you need to ride him like a tilt-o-whirl.”

“She’s really not my kind of girl — most of them have tattoos or nose rings — but there’s something about her smile. She smiles like she’s in love with whoever she’s looking at. She smiled at me a few months ago. I’ve been trying to get her to do it again ever since.”

“Maybe he didn’t really encourage me to do things, but he didn’t prevent me from doing them either. But after a while, I didn’t do things because I didn’t want him to think different about me. But the thing is, I wasn’t being honest. So, why would I care whether or not he loved me when he didn’t really even know me?”

“I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on”