"With love like that, you can't get pick about how it finds you or the details. All that matters is that it's there. Better late than never."

"When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a colouring book, with the inside not yet completed."

"There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand."

"The worst thing you can do if you miss or need someone is let them know it."

"What you have to decide... is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it? Listen, the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody. So dont be afraid. Be alive."

"Like a word on a page that you've printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign. And you feel scared for a second, like you've lost something, even if you're not sure what it is."

"It took a lot of work to be perfect. If you didn't want to break a sweat, there was no point in even bothering."

"If you try anything, if you try to lose weight, or to improve yourself, or to love, or to make the world a better place, you have already achieved something wonderful, before you even begin. Forget failure. If things don't work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!"

"A song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment. Which is pretty amazing, when you actually think about it."

"Life is full of screwups. You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existance."

"The girl in the tight black dress was passing by us now, eyeing Wes and walking entirely too slowly. "Hi," she said, and he nodded at her but didn't reply. Knew it, I thought.Honestly," I said.What?"Come on. You have to admit, it's sort of ridiculous."What is?"Now that I had to define it, I found myself struggling for the right words. "You know," I said, then figured Kristy had really summed it up best. "The sa-woon."The what?"

"Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak."

"For as long as I could remember, other people had either overshadowed me or left me out in the open, alone. But Mac, as Layla had said all those weeks ago, was always somewhere nearby. He left me enough space to stand alone, but stood at the ready for the moment that I didn't want to. It was the perfect medium, I was learning. Like he was my saint, the one I'd been waiting for."

"I'd made my choice, though, and I couldn't take it back."

"Oh for God's sake,' Heather said, 'I wish you two would just go out, fail miserably as a couple, and get it over with."

"He's very nice. He's something I replied. She considered this zipping her purse shut. Then she said Well everyone is. Everyone is Something. For some reason that stuck with me simple and yet not every since she'd said it. It was like a puzzle as well two vague words with one clear one between them."

"I was such a smart kid, I should have figured out that the only way to really get my parents' attention was to disappoint them or fail. But by the time I finally realized that, succeeding was already a habit too ingrained to break."

"The silence wasn't like the ones I'd known lately, though; it wasn't empty so much as chosen. There's an entirely different feel to quiet when you're with someone else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending."

"When you don't know where you're going, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to have more than you need."

"I don't think anybody ever really knows what's going to happen," he said. "We're all just out here hoping for the best."

"But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear."

"This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don't jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going."

"Everything in life had its phases, and if you were smart, you learned to appreciate them all. What really mattered, though, were the people in those moments with you. Memories are what we have and what we keep, and I held mine close. The ones I knew well, like a night on the beach with a boy who would always live in my heart, and the ones yet to come with another."

"Nunca habría sido capaz de decírselo, pero Owen me inspiraba. Las mentiras piadosas que yo decía a diario, las cosas que me guardaba, cada vez que no era sincera del todo... ahora me daba cuenta de eso. También era consciente de lo bien que me sentaba al ser capaz de decirle a alguien lo que pensaba de veras. Aunque solo fuera sobre música."

"I'd been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough."

"Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild, as if by my evil twin. All week, I kept making lists and crossing things off them, ending each day with a sense of great accomplishment eclipsed only by complete and total exhaustion."

"I didnt pay atteniton to times or distance, instead focusing on how it felt just to be in motion, knowing it wasn't about the finish line but how I got there that mattered."

"Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that's what makes you strong."

"Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine."

"Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend."

"Too many locks, not enough keys."

"It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be."

"All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real."

"Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it. "It's a start," I said."

"Macy: "In Truth, I said, "there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.Wes: "How do you win? he askedMacy: "That, I said, "is such a boy question."

"I mean, it's impossible to fake anything if you've already seen the other person in a way they'd never choose for you to. You can't go back from that."

"Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are."

"For once, you believed in yourself. you believed you were beautiful and so did the rest of the world."

"It's hard to do," I said. Wes looked at me. "What is?" I swallowed, not sure why I'd said this out loud. "Get it right."

"It's funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine."

"I planned my whole future around Adam,' she said now, quietly. 'And now I have nothing.''No,' I told her, 'now you just don't have Adam. There's a big difference, Lissa. You just can't see it yet."

"When I was a teen, I was never really into the captain of the football team or the student body president. The guys I liked were quirky and different: They listened to music I'd never heard of, never had lunch or gas money, and could always make you laugh."

"Fine," he repeated, and I wondered why it was I kept coming back to this, again and again, a word that you said when someone asked how you were but didn't really care to know the truth."

"But as i lay there, it only seemes like silence filling my ears. And the thing was, it was so freaking loud."

"It seemed like this day could go in so many directions, like a spiderweb shooting out toward endless possibilities. Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening."

"I'm not into appearances. I like flaws, I think they make things interesting."

"I love writing about the summer between high school and college. It's the last gasp of really being a teen."

"If June was the beginning of a hopeful summer, and July the juice middle, August was suddenly feeling like the bitter end."

"Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it."

"Good be- gets bad, something lost leads to found..."