“For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers.”

“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer”

“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”

“I love Conrad and I probably always would. I would spend my whole life loving him one way or another. Maybe I would get married, maybe I would have a family, but it wouldn’t matter, because a piece of my heart, the piece where summer lived, would always be Conrad’s”

“I say, " I can't believe you're really here."He sounds almost shy when he says, "Me neither." And then he hesitates. "Are you still coming with me?"I cant believe he even has to ask. I would go anywhere. "Yes," I tell him. It feels like nothing else exists outside of that word, this moment. There's just us. Everything that happened this past summer and every summer before it, has all led up to this.To Now”

“It was like coming home after you'd been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.”

“Nothing, nothing felt better than the way sand felt beneath my feet. It was both solid and shifting. Constant and ever-changing. It was summer.”