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"French name, English accent, American school. Anna confused."
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"Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose."

"New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is."

"Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one."

"For a clever man, different cultures, different lives, different attitudes, different dreams, different of everything are a good teacher! You only take the things you already know from somebody or something like you!"

"The young Cambridge group the group that stood for "freedom" and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy and a whispering murmuring sort of voice and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner."

"I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult."

"In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale."

"Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is."
Explore more quotes by Stephanie Perkins

"I just can't fathom why anyone would stand on a ledge when there's a respectable amount of walking space right next to it."

"He snuffles. Oh, no.He's not going to cry, is he? Because even though it's sweet when guys cry, I am so not prepared for this.Girl scouts didn't teach me what to do with emotionally unstable drunk boys."

"It gets worse. Josh tell her that he loves her. She says it back. He touches her. She touches him back. And then they're losing their virginity on the floor of her bedroom beside her pet rabbit, Isis. A rabbit.Josh literally lost his virginity in front of a metaphor for sex."

"The directness of her question throws me. 'I don't know. Sometimes I think there are only so many opportunities...to get together with someone. And we've both screwed up so many times'- my voice grows quiet - 'that we've missed our chance.'Anna.' Mer pauses. 'That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.'But-'But what? You love him, and he loves you, and you live in the most romantic city in the world."

"We're enveloped in pitch black. 'Wait here,' I whisper.'Are you getting your ax?'Handcuffs.'Kinky. But, okay, I'll try it."

"They blinked in the dusk of the setting sun, a reminder that light was a recurring state."

"Because that's the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don't want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It's mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time."

"I look at you, and I think about you, and ... I don't know. No one has ever confounded me the way you do."
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