“It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you'd relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays.”

“She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness. It was the way she felt when she looked at the stars.”

“Cole kissed me.. It was the sort of kiss that would take a long time to recover from. You could take each of our kisses, from the very first moment we'd met and put them on a slide in a microscope, and I was pretty sure what you'd find. Even an expert would see nothing on the first one, and then on the next one, the start of something - mostly outnumbered, easily destroyed - and then more and more until finally this one, something that even the untrained eye could spot. Evidence that we'd probably never be cured of each other, but we might be able to keep it from killing us.”

“Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.”

“I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you're not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was really a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me.”

“Strangely, I thought of the emotion I ought to feel without feeling it, as impartial as a National Geographic field researcher, carefully watching the events and chronicling them in a notebook. Deirdre finds that she is saddened by the news of her grandmother's death, and moreover, suddenly fears for the rest of her family and friends.”

“I feel a strange, fierce squeeze in my heart when I see him, like pride, although there's nothing about Sean that I can take credit for.”