“All the little quirks that make even the most barren, frigid places beautiful, that make a tiny gray dot on the map the one place you'll always call home, no matter where your glamorous, boring, adventurous, average, ridiculous, impossible, epic, romantic, bacon-infused life leads you.”

“What good are all those bits of nostalgia when the one thing that truly holds you to a place - the one thing that really makes it home over any other dot on the map - crumbles?”

“Being with Josh is like being touched from the inside out. An unexpected blaze of sunshine on an otherwise bleak winter day. Wrapping your fingers around a mug of hot chocolate after walking home in that frigid lake-effect wind. A fire crackling softly beneath your outstretched hands. The perfect combination of cupcake and icing, the kind where you can’t quite identify all the secret ingredients, but you feel them melting together on your tongue, and you know that for as long you live, this will be the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

“I'm still dropping dishes thinking in slow motion about the GPS woman in Mom's car. I imagine her beckoning me from outside the kitchen window illuminated like some robot-angel calling me forth to the Lexus where she will ferry me off to that planet of monotonous peace that special otherworldly place where all the residents are relaxed and confident and completely numb. Your life will. Get better in. Six. Point four. Million. Miles.”

“What if I come back and I'm different, Anna? Sometimes you go to a place where everything is different, and everything you ever know changes, and no one ever looks at you the same? ”

“Frankie was so mad that she threw my journal into the bottom of the ocean where it is banished for all eternity with a lovesick mermaid who cries out pieces of sea glass. Are you going to eat that bacon?”

“No one wants to do it with a chick who smells like bacon." Her brow creases. "Everybody loves bacon.”