"Two a.m.' He swallowed, then said, "You know. The person you can call at two a.m. and, no matter what, you can count on them. Even if they're asleep or it's cold or you need to be bailed out of jail...they'll come for you. It's like, the highest level of friendship."

"If you have just one person believe in you, you'll always find your way."

"Silence is so freaking loud."

"The first step is always the hardest."

"I would miss Colby, but it wasn't going anywhere. All the more reason why I should."

"My mother was strong, in all the ways I was weak. She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you will never know."

"I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you get enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying."

"The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home."

"So many times it seemed like there were chances to stop things before they started. Or even stop them in midstream. But it was even worse when you knew in that very moment that there was still time to save yourself, and yet you couldn't even budge."

"Why does she have wings?'So she can fly."

"I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all."

"These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it."

"Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make."

"I don't know," I said. "What else did you do for your first eighteen years?""Like I said," he said as I unlocked the car, "I'm not so sure that you should go by my example.""Why not?""Because I have my regrets," he said. "Also, I'm a guy. And guys do different stuff.""Like ride bikes?" I said."No," he replied. "Like have food fights. And break stuff. And set off firecrackers on people's front porches. And...""Girls can't set off firecrackers on people's front porches?""They can," he said... "But they're smart enough not to. That's the difference."

"Some people, they can't just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just...something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time."

"We make such messes in this life, both accidently 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."

"Wherever you will go, I will let you down, But this lullaby goes on."

"The thing is, you can't always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns."

"Explain it to me."But I couldn't. I'd had to learn it my own way, and so had my mother. Jason would eventually, as well. No one could tell you: you just had to go through it on your own. If you were lucky, you came out on the other side and understood., If you didn't, you kept getting thrust back, retracing those steps, until you finally got it right."

"We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever.That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now."

"So you should remember that, when you're thinking about what other people can deal with. Maybe it's not so bad."

"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."

"Everything hurt. I closed my eyes, pressing my cheek to the street, and waited. What for, I didn't know. To be rescued. Or found. But no one came. All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was."

"He wasn't the type for displays of affection, either verbal or not. He was disgusted by couples that made out in the hallways between classes, and got annoyed at even the slightest sappy moments in movies. But I knew he cared about me: he just conveyed it more subtly, as concise with expressing this emotion as he was with everything else. It was in the way he'd put his hand on the small of my back, for instance, or how he'd smile at me when I said something that surprised him. Once I might have wanted more, but I'd come around to his way of thinking in the time we'd been together. And we were together, all the time. So he didn't have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know."

"I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one things was for sure: like it or not, you'd never be alone."

"Anger's not bad," he said. "It's human..."

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."

"It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are."

"I was just stock in the middle, vague and undefined."

"But if everything was always smooth and perfect, you'd get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you'll never really enjoy it when things go right."

"There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying."

"I'm sorry," I heard him say again. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden blur of movement as he slid out of his seat, left some bills for the breakfast he wouldn't eat, and walked away. And as he did, I thought again of those mornings in the hallway at school, way back in ninth grade. Everything had started in such sharp detail, each aspect pronounced and clear. Obviously, endings were different. Harder to see, full of shapes that could be one thing or another, with all the things that you were once so sure of suddenly not familiar, if they were even recognizable at all."

"What you do in your dreams is never your choice. But it made me happy anyway."

"I wasn't ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn't that I wasn't right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn't right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn't come easy for, someone like me."

"If this was my forever, I didn't want to spend another second of it here."

"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."

"That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking."

"Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common."

"It's okay to accept things from people. It doesn't make you weak or helpless."

"The fate of your heart is your choice and no one else gets a vote."

"But all I could think of was how when nothing made sense and hadn't for ages, you just have to grab onto anything you feel sure of."

"He was not my boyfriend. On the other hand, he wasn't just a friend either. Instead, our relationship was elastic, stretching between those two extremes depending on who else was around, how much either of us had to drink, and other varying factors. This was exactly what I wanted, as commitments had never really been my thing. And it wasn't like it was hard, either. The only trick was never giving more than you were willing to lose."

"You only really fall apart in front of the people you know can piece you back together."

"You asked me to go out with you. I know you probably changed your mind. But you should know, the answer was yes. It's always been yes when it comes to you."

"Maybe we were all destined to just keep doing the same stupid things, over and over again, never really learning a single thing."

"The people who know you best can be risker, because the words they say and things they think have the potential to be not only scary but true, as well."