"You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things that you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself."

"The way I see it, he's all we have left ofher."

"Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom."

"She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone."

"That's the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself."

"I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way."

"It still hurts," she whispered. "Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding."

"You'll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you're still the one in control."

"My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct."

"When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation."

"She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting."

"It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out."

"I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor."

"Even if we have grown so far apart that we don't recognize each other when we pass, we have this life, this block of time, and what do you think about that?"

"You can miss a person you've never known."

"Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture."

"Most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don't blame them. It's superstition: If you give assistance to the family in need... if you throw salt over your shoulder... if you don't step on the cracks, then maybe you'll be immune. Maybe you'll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you."

"I realize that I quite like this girl. It's not just that she's so pretty the words fly out of my mind before they can leave my mouth-it's that when we're chatting, I feel like I've known her all my life."

"When it rains," her father said "it pours."

"Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either."

"There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character."

"Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back."

"I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway."

"As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child."

"If you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details."

"God, don't they teach you how to spell these days?""No," I answer. "They teach us to use spell-check."

"It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don't like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn't speak that language. They didn't learn it as children and they didn't manage to pick it up as adults, either."

"Every baby is born beautiful. It's what we project on them that makes them ugly."

"I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect."

"When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself."

"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."

"Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others."

"But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else."

"Every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter."

"You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed - the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience."

"She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life."

"Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer."