"Oh honey, have you learned nothing from these plays? Ain't such a line between faking and being."

"If I stay. If I live. It's up to me.All this business about medically induced comas is just doctor talk. It's not up to the doctors. It's not up to the absentee angels. It's not even up to God who, if He exists, is nowhere around right now. It's up to me."

"Next time I get sick, you can tell that to me. You can be my girl in the mountains.""Okay", I say."I'll be your mountain girl and take care of you."

"Why wasn't I nicer to Alice? When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should say something to her, but before I can find the words, she's tooting her horn and disappearing down the street.I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn't nicer."

"I look at Ben now. And again I wonder how it is that we can feel so many of the same things and be so utterly different."

"Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic with them, it's as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny."

"I clap because I know what will happen when I stop. It's the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie - one that I've lost myself to - which is that I'll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I'll watch a movie all over again just to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn't make any sense."

"And just in general, I'm better. Better than I've been since Bram died, and in some ways better than I was even before that. No, Lulu didn't break my hear. But I'm beginning to wonder if in some roundabout way, she fixed it."

"Everyone has hardship in their life. Everyone has pain."

"Sometimes I did feel like I came from a different tribe. I was not like my outgoing, ironic dad or my tough-chick mom. And as if to seal the deal, instead of learning to play electric guitar, I'd gone and chosen the cello."

"In a funny way, Dad was always a bow-tie wearer, always a little more traditional than you might imagine. Because even though he had blue hair and tattoos and wore leather jackets and worked in a record store, he wanted to marry Mom back at a time when the rest of their friends were still having drunken one-night stands. "Girlfriend is such a stupid word," he said. "I couldn't stand calling her that. So, we had to get married, so I could call her "wife"'."

"I remember watching it all and getting the tickling in my chest and thinking to myself: This is what happiness feels like."

"It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through."

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with just ten digits."

"Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them."

"The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides."

"But now here I am: No money. No place to stay. It should be my worst nightmare. But I don't care. It's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not."

"But then Mason touches my neck, to the spot on it where the cut from that night has since healed, and I pull away.He was right, after all; it didn't leave a scar, though part of me wishes it had. At least I'd have some evidence, some justification of this permanence. Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them."

"Meg invited me to come again, but I always had reasons why I couldn't: my schedule was busy, bus fare wasn't cheap. Both of which were true, even if they weren't the truth."

"Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it's the easiest thing."

"Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too."

"I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don't seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing."

"I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up."

"Quitting's not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy."Really? Was that how you quit me? And just like that, without thinking, without saying it in my head first, without arguing with myself for days, it's out there."So, she says, as if speaking to an audience under the bridge. "He finally says it."

"But then one time, you track down an email address and you're near a computer with Internet access so you don't have that nice cushion and you type what you're feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren't. They weren't worth saying at all."

"Samo mislim da su sprovodi vrlo slični smrti. Možeš imati želje i planove, ali na kraju ipak nemaš kontrolu ni nad čim.“

"Love, it never dies. It never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it. Love can make you immortal."

"After that, I became kind of fascinated by her and by what I guessed was her ability to hear music in the silence. Back then, I'd wanted to be able to do that, too. So I took to watching her play, and though I told myself the reason for my attention was because she was as dedicated a musician as I was and that she was cute, the truth was that I also wanted to understand what she heard in the silence."

"Sleepovers and dance parties and those talks we would have until three in the morning that would make us feel lousy the next day because we'd slept like hell but also feel good because the talks were like blood transfusions, moments of realness and hope that were pinpricks of light in the dark fabric of small-town life."

"Concert' doesn't mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony."

"Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it's the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now, it's frozen shut."

"You must not waste your one day here. When the sun shines, you let it shine on you. Snow is always waiting."

"But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today."

"That whole day, being with Willem, being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door."

"I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one."

"I don't want to lose you because of the f**ked-up way I found you."

"You never know what will last."He said that earlier, about accidents, about never knowing which one is just a kink in the road and which one is a fork, about never knowing your life is changing until it's already happened."I think sometimes you do know," I say, my voice filling with emotion."

"Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song."

"But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own."

"Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved?"

"Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away."

"Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith."

"I've hardly taken any pictures on this trip. Melanie teased me about it, to which I always said I preferred to experience something rather than obsessively record it. Though, really, the truth of it was, unlike Melanie (who wanted to remember the shoe salesman and the mime and the cute waiter and all the other people on the tour), none of that really mattered to me. At the start of the trip, I took shots of the sights. The Colosseum. Belvedere Palace. Mozart Square. But I stopped. They never came out very well, and you could get postcards of these things.But there are no postcards of this. Of life."

"How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another?"

"But the you who you are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I'll be in love with tomorrow."

"Cinders, I would've thought you of all people would know better. There are no wicked stepmothers and there are no fairy godmothers, and there are no Prince Charmings. There in no preordained destiny. You get to decide that. You decide your destiny."

"When we got back home, Gramps dropped me off and enveloped me in a hug. Normally, he was a handshaker, maybe a back-patter on really special occasions. His hug was strong and tight, and I knew it was his way of telling me that he'd had a wonderful time."Me, too, Gramps, I whispered."

"It wasn't even a fight, really. We didn't shout. We barely even argued, but a snake of tension quietly slithered into our lives."

"No way through it but through it," I tell myself."

"In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's."