“Who says all the lines of love are supposed to match up? I'd never thought about it that way before - that maybe your perfect other wasn't everything you already were, but everything you were never going to be.”

“Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will."...You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said...."Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?”

“That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.”

“More than anyone in that room, I was aware of exactly the sort of person who did such a thing. What I hadnn't realized until that very moment, though, was that it wasn't just my mother who was guilty of all these offenses. I'd told myself that everything I'd done in the weeks before and since she left was to make sure I would never be like her. But it was too late. All I had to do was look at the way I'd reacted to what Cora had told me that morning- taking off, getting wasted, letting myself be left alone in a strange place- to know I already was...Perhaps I was just like my mother. But looking up at Cora's hand, I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn't already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this wasn't already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to trya nad prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway. ~Ruby, pg 225”

“No rush. This time things were slow and earnest. This time I wasn't looking for an escape. This time it was about him. About me. About honesty and compassion and everything I'd never expected to find in Wesley Rush.”

“I thought if you loved someone you were supposed to, like, forgive them. I thought that was what love was supposed to be all about."Cork shook his head: "Easy to say, harder to do.”