“Being a thinker was a various thing. Sometimes you felt like a turtle, with a nice, private built-in place to shelter. Other times it was like having a bucket stuck on your head, making the world clang and echo and never stop.”

“The daisies and buttercups nodded in the breeze, like skinny-necked old ladies listening to dance music.What if necessary evil had an opposite? This is what it would be. This unnecessary good.For the first time in days, Mo smiled.”

“You know when you're floating on your back in the lake, the water rises and falls against your ears? So that for half a second you can hear everything around you and then for the other half a second everything's muted? It almost feels like your suspended between two worlds.”

“So you're, like crazy, in love. You open your eyes in the morning and your first thought is her. You wonder how she is. What she's doing. When you can see her again. Those thoughts stay with you all day. You share them with whoever will listen — including your best friends, who of course respect you but, after a while, out of the kind of concern only real friends have, seriously question your sanity. And you make all sorts of plans — big plans, like, post-high school — when the rest of us can barely wrap our heads around the fact that we only two years left to get a clue.You live and breath this girl. You talk about her all the time, you hang out with your friends less and less, you're blind to other girls, no matter how hot or into you they are — and some of them are extremely hot and into you — and eventually, you break and actually say you love her.Not only that, you tell your friends you love her. Which, as you know, is about as major as you can get. Your friends may think you're a little out there, but they know you wouldn't be for any other girl. It's just because it's her. She's different. This girl is it for you. Food, water, oxygen, sleep — all details.”

“Sunlight and shade,' his oma had commented once. Jathan liked that, mostly because shade meant that even though things were dim for a time, the sun was still there, just on the other side of the barrier.”

“You don't want to look back at your years with regrets. Regrets have no place in your memory jar.”

“Now do you understand why I'm interested in you? You're a locked door, sweetheart. You give no one a key and you never answer the door when anyone knocks...Ah, but sometimes, sometimes I get a peek through the keyhole and what I find there...It's like glimpsing you as you're stripping. Underneath all of that darkness is something hungry, something desperate, something, oh, so deliciously vulnerable.”