“Listen,” she said. “I may not bewhat you want right now, but I’m all you’ve got.”

“It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.”

“I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.”

“I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.”

“But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secretthatsome mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else’s smile; that she wasstanding on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip andattracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, whenyou got right down to it, didn’t want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.”

“Everything you said, Ellie, it's true. I should be very angry. I was, for a time, but now I'm not. Now I've gotten past my own selfishness to where I've got to help her. See, when you're Plain, you don't put yourself forward. You just don't do it, because that would be Hochmut–puffing yourself up–and the truth is there's always others more important than you. So Katie, when she hears others telling lies about her and this baby, she won’t want to fight back, or stand up for herself. I am here to stand up for her.”

“She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.”