"Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly."

"How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?'Eudoxia's expression grew more serious. 'That's what you're doing anyway, my dear."

"Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever."

"Honesty was a tough customer... Once you started allowing yourself some honesty, it couldn't easily be contained or limited to one part of your life. It was like poison ivy or a bossy houseguest. Once it was there, you couldn't tell it what to do. You had to really fight to keep it from taking over."

"She existed in her friends, there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them."

"I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people."

"But it was smell that carried memory."

"Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things."

"How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn't forget?"

"You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right."

"Time is what keeps things from happening all at once."

"There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn't quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren't under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you'd have to land eventually."

"Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good about yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could flip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct ad had nothing at all to give."

"She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn't willing to risk ..."

"Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison."

"Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others."

"I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you?"

"What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back."

"How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most."

"She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back."

"Parents were the only ones obligated to love you from the rest of the world you had to earn it."

"Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still."

"I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting."

"Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball."

"Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who'd missed everything."

"You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things."

"She looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn't have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her."

"Carmen knew a worse friend would have made her feel better."

"When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word."

"Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do."

"People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it."

"Carmen: 'I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college, but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same, but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me."

"The weather turned. Her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want to cry. Into all those millions of open pores came the sunshine, and other feelings as well. In and out. She was porous."

"Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed."

"She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn't have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?"

"It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn't come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren't ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal."

"I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up."

"But I know this. We're ready to move forward again in our way. Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together."

"You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want."

"Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together."

"She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy."

"Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn't want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueller paradoxes of human nature."

"Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose."

"They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age."

"Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren."

"Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought."

"She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing."

"He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn't work anymore. In fact, they'd never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world's more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked."

"The path of your life can change in an instant."

"Maybe you think you'll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn't work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It's by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it."