“Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”

“Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead. Jolie laide, that's what I would choose. Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”

“Physical beauty wasn't the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North.”

“He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.”

“What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I've ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.”

“The look he gave me...My stomach quivered in that exact same way when I watched Before Sunset, yearning for a guy to know me so deeply and truly, we were only really complete when we were together. That I could talk, go on wild tangents, make obtuse references, and he would divine my meaning before I knew what I was trying to say myself. Erik had fallen asleep next to me on the couch, complaining later that the movie was "just people talking." He had no idea that this movie could have been a love letter written for me.”

“But the truly brilliant geocachers?""Yeah?" he says. "What about us?""They know it by its real name. Terra Firma.""Terra Firma," he repeats. At last, he slips his backpack off his shoulder. I know what he's looking for.I take a breath. "You don't need your GPS for this cache."His eyes don't move off mine; he's watching me so carefully. "You don't, huh?""Nope," I say.Some things are meant to be kept - what you learn from experiences good or bad, smiles from an orphaned girl, a boy who is your compass pointing to your True North. So I look at Jacob full in the face with nothing obscuring him. Or me. And then I step closer to him. And closer. And closer yet."Here I am," I tell him. "Here I am.”