"You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It`s you who makes me a person."

"Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes."

"I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first. (Riley to her sister Alice about Paul)"

"She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous."

"Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him."

"When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot."

"Healing wasn't always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that."

"I'm afraid of time... I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies."

"He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend."

"They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she."

"I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go."

"You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen."

"Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out."

"Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace."

"She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time."

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not."

"Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead."

"It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything."

"You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried."

"When she made her way to the big picture window that framed the dining room table she froze. She stopped breathing. The anger was growing again.It grew up into her throat, where she could taste it, coppery like blood, in the back of her mouth. It grew down into her stomach, where it knotted her intestines. It made her arms stiffen and her shoulders lock. It pushed against her ribs until she felt they would snap like sticks."

"His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children."

"The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated."

"In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt read. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by own fears and wants. And who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens."

"Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms."

"A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand."

"A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting."

"Sometimes you need to make a mess."

"Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have."

"Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness."

"There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him."

"Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair."

"What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them."

"If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death."

"We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real."

"My mother says it can't stay like this, but I believe it will. The Pants are like an omen. They stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together. But they stand for a challenge too. It's not enough to stay in Bethesda, Maryland, and hunker down in air-conditioned houses. We promise one another that someday we'd get out in the world and figure some stuff out."

"This is the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. I you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want."

"She hadn't chosen the brave life. She'd chosen the small, fearful one."

"You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn't decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place."

"She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it."

"The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched."

"I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started."

"It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven."

"She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn't. You didn't know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn't know how strong you were."

"My memory is good for some things and not others."

"Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it."

"When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them."

"Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her."

"People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight-at least as the normally experienced them."

"Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing."

"Lena, listen to me, okay? We don't have much more time here. You are in love. I've never seen anything like this before. You have to be brave, okay? You have to go and tell Kostos how you feel. I swear to God if you don't, you will regret it for the rest of your cowardly life.''What if he doesn't like me back?''That's what I mean about being brave."