"It was so quiet, I could hear my own breathing, loud in my ears. 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 any 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."

"But I knew what it said. That I could be imperfect, but only so much. Human, but only within limits. And honest, to her or to myself, never."

"Love is so unpredictable. Sometimes you'll know a man for years and then one day, boom! Suddenly you see him in a different way. And other times, it's that first date, that first moment. That's what makes it so great."

"She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over."

"After all, it's all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little....like blow drying your hair, applying concealer, and cursing those magazine inserts. It all counts. It has to."

"The further you go, the more you have to be proud of. At the same time, in order to come a long way, you have to be behind to begin with. IN the end, though maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all."

"Why don't you ever wait a second and see what I'm planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance."

"Don't think or judge, just listen."

"You stop believing in wishes when the only one you want to make can never come true."

"To me she said, "It's this stupid gotcha thing, they've been doing it for weeks now. Leaping out at each other and us, scaring the hell out of everyone.""It's a game of wits," Bert said to me."Half-wits," Kristy added."

"I felt tears prick my eyes as I looked down at the model again, looking at that girl and boy on the curb. Forever in that place, together."

"Stuff that would be weird in the bright light of day just wasn't so much once you passed a certain hour."

"Look, he said, "the point is there's no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. So you're left with a choice. Either hope for the best, or just expect the worst.If you expect the worst, you're never disappointed, I pointed out.Yeah, but who lives like that?"

"After the group vet appointment--during which Lyle scratched the vet, the vet tech, and some poor woman minding her own business in the waiting room--we went back to Sabrina's and re-released the cats to their natural habitat."

"Most people put off my mother's erratic behavior to the fact that she was a writer, as if that just explained everything. To me that was just an excuse. I mean, brain surgeons can be crazy too, but no one says that's all right. Fortunately for my mother, I am alone in this opinion."

"But wasn't that always the way. It's never something huge that changes everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you're busy focusing on the big picture."

"Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can't fully understand."

"He grinned again. We'd only been seeing each other for a few weeks now, but this easy give-and-take still surprised me. From that very first day in my room, I felt like we'd somehow skipped the formalities of the Beginning of a Relationship: those awkward moments when you're not all over each other and are still feeling out the other person's boundaries and limits. Maybe this was because we'd been circling each other for a while before he finally catapulted through my window. But if I let myself think about it much - and I didn't - I had flashes of realising that I'd been comfortable with him even at the very start. Clearly, he'd been comfortable with me, grabbing my hand as he had that first day. As if he knew, even then, that we'd be here now."

"The choices you make now, the people you surround yourself with, they all have the potential to affect your life, even who you are, forever."

"Failing sucks. But it's better than the alternative.""Which is?""Not even trying." Now he did look at me, straight on. "Life's short, you know?"

"The best gifts come from the heart, not the store."

"The truth was I knew, after all those flat January days, that I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a thousand expressions, and the warmth of a baby's kick beneath my hand. I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could be over the course of my life, each one better than the last."

"Grieving doesn't make you imperfect. It makes you human."

"All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below."

"If you didn't love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go."

"I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. "We can't heal you at Evergreen", the very somber voiceover said. "But we can help you to heal yourself." It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything. "Hey Cass, "I'd say, "hand me that toothpaste." "Caitlin," she'd say, her voice dark and serious. "I can't hand you the toothpaste. But I CAN help you hand the toothpaste to yourself."

"It was great. Freedom even the imagined kind always is."

"There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise."

"Isn't that the way everything begins? A night, a love, a once and for all."

"Look," I said, "We knew Jason and Becky would be back, the break would end. This isn't a surprise, it's what's supposed to happen. It's what we wanted. Right?""Is it?" he asked. "Is it what you want?"Whether he intended it to be or not, this was the final question, the last Truth. If I said what I really thought, I was opening myself up for a hurt bigger than I could even imagine. I didn't have it in me. We changed and altered so many rules, but it was this one, the only one when we'd started, that I would break."Yes," I said."

"It didn't make you noble to step away from something that wasn't working, even if you thought you were the reason for the malfunction. Especially then. It just made you a quitter. Because if you were the problem, chances were you could also be the solution. The only way to find out was to take another shot."

"I understand that you are under a lot of pressure and that it's hard being a bride. That is all well and good. But it does not, ever, entitle you to be rude, selfish, uncaring, and generally obnoxious to me or Haven or anyone else. We've been very patient with you because we're your family and we love you, but it stops here. I don't care if the wedding is two weeks or two hours away, you were never raised to behave this way."

"Timing clicking together, finally, pieces falling into place."

"So you're always honest," I said."Aren't you?""No," I told him. "I'm not.""Well, that's good to know, I guess.""I'm not saying I'm a liar," I told him. He raised his eyebrows. "That's not how I meant it, anyways.""How'd you mean it, then?""I just...I don't always say what I feel.""Why not?""Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said."Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though."

"To me, summer has always been about potential. This was especially true when I was in high school. Those 3 or so months between 1 school year and the next always meant change. People got taller or wider or smaller. They broke up or came together, lost friends or gained them, had life experiences that you could tell had transformed them even if you didn't know what they were. In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible. As a teenager, I was always hoping to change, to become someone other than who I was. Each summer, I felt I had the chance to do that. All I had to do was wait and see what happened."

"It shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder-or impossible-to lose."

"She was dressing for the life she wanted, not the one she had."

"I knew that in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late again. I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome."

"You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking."

"I remembered Owen telling me how music had saved him in Phoenix, that it drowned everything out, and it was the same for me now. As long as I had something to listen to, I could blur the things I didn't want to think about, if not block them out completely."

"Sure, it sucked to be lost, but I'd long ago realized I preferred it to depending on anyone else to get me where I needed to go. That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened- good, bad, or anywhere in between- it was always, if nothing else, all your own."

"Isn't it weird? The way you remember things when it's gone."

"What defines you isn't how many times you crash but the number of times you get back."

"You could just tell when a person belonged somewhere. That is something you can't fake, no matter how hard you try."

"Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be so easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder--if not impossible--to lose."

"Look, everyone mourns at their own pace. Maybe you're just a little bit ahead of her, but she'll get to you eventually. The important thing is that you keep trying to talk to each other, even if it's difficult at first. It gets easier. I promise."

"Fifteen minutes later, a meeting was called. "Okay, look." Deb's face was dead serious. "I know I just joined this project, and I don't want to offend anyone. But I'm going to be honest. I think you've been going about this all wrong." "I'm offended," Dave told her flatly."

"She knew I could tell with one glance, one look, one simple instant. It was her eyes. Despite the thick makeup, they were still dark-rimmed., haunted, and sad. Most of all though, they were familiar. The fact that we were in front of hundreds of strangers changed nothing at all. I'd spent a summer with those same eyes-scared, lost, confused-staring back at me. I would have known them anywhere."

"The thing about negotiations, not to mention the manipulation, is you can't go too far in any direction. Refusing once is good, twice is usually okay but a third is risky. You never know when the third person will stop playing and you end up with nothing."

"There were so many places in my time with Rogerson that I wished I could go back to, hitting the stop button at just one moment to stop everything that came after. I had so many If Onlys, but each place I thought to stop meant missing something that came later. I needed it all, in the end, to make my own story find its finish."