“When the truth came out, and no one wanted tobe around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn’t want to be around herself either.”

“Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuousroom, sure-a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter-but itwas also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn’twant to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.”

“Over her shoulder was Josie-and for the first time, Alex couldreally see a piece of herself in her daughter. It wasn’t so much the shape of the face but the shine ofit; not the color of the eyes but the dream caught like smoke in them. There was no amount ofexpensive makeup that would make her look the way her Josie did; that was simply what falling inlove did to a person.Could you be jealous of your own child?”

“Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.”

“Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse - breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn't wanted on either. It was called falling in love for a reason - because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.”

“Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.”

“Suddenly, I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to pretend I'm fooling the world when I'm not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I'm not doing a very good job myself.”