"You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought - put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it."

"The way two people can and everything place, find each other in a crowd, and change your life the lives of the people around them forever... It makes you believe in fate. In fate love some extra authority. Some destined significance.' Wow, very powerful."

"What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short, ' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out ready for the military>"

"True love, the good, beautiful, one - and - only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story. It overlooks what he can't give you or how she failed you or what mistakes he made when he was struggling. It stays steady at its center. It evolves, through drought and storm. It grows. It survives."

"I've wished for things and never really had the chance...It's time to stop dreaming and do something about it. You've got to know what you want, then...go."

"People can attach themselves to something - an idea, another person, a desire - with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death. Will is a powerful thing. Will - it's supposed to be a good treat, a more determined and persistent version of determination and persistence. But will and obsession - they sit right next to each other. They pretend to be strangers and all the while meet secretly at midnight.'"

"I thought about him everyday until then. I started having these conversations with him in my head that you have when you meet someone you sense is going to be important in your life."

"Because what is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it. It can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog; hidden behind a curve of road, and then suddenly there in full glory. Its waves come like breaths, in and out, in and out, body stretched to forever in its possibilities, and yet its heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic."

"Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you're not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut - grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don't have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out."

"Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character."

"We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and jillions of the tiniest grains of sand to form one long, soft beach - yep, even that was possible."

"Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them."

"You've got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn't define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don't have to struggle to be good enough for."

"They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear."

"People are secretive when they have secrets."

"It's shocking the things we call love."

"Forever is hard enough without it beginning now."

"And pity - people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you - that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people."

"You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through."

"I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win...What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to 'succeed' at your chosen 'direction' was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too."

"We look down our noses at people who've made mistakes in relationships. She's so stupid! How could she do that! Our superiority makes us feel better. But I'd bet everything I have on the fact that people to claim to have a perfect record in love are either lying or have very limited dating experience. People who say, I'd never do that! Someday, unless you are very, very lucky, you'll have a story to tell. Or not to tell."

"In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser."

"I am beginning to think there are two kinds of people, ' she said. I waited. 'Those who forgive themselves too easily but will not forgive others.' 'And?' I asked. 'Those that forgive others too easily but will not forgive themselves."

"If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)"

"Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth."

"Too often in my life, love has been defined as 'humiliation with occasional roses'."

"Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all."

"Running away can also be running to."

"I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this."

"Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves."

"It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is - a sense of loss for something you never had."

"Rejection, though - it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending."

"Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery."

"The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket."

"It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama."

"Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run - from danger, toward new places to feed ourselves."

"I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center."

"It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal."

"But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off."

"A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word 'no, ' of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone's jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it's not even about you. It's about a hand that is already gripping. It's about their need, circling around your throat"

"Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink."

"If you look up 'charming' in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?"

"I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving."

"So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love."

"Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was."

"What came next wasn't exactly silence, because although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part about an unhappy household - that feeling of being perched and listening, the way an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger."

"Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion."

"Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always."

"Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight."

"You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make - your very heartbeat, almost."