Parents were the only ones obligated to love you from the rest of the world you had to earn it.
When you feel someone else’s pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.
Love who you love while you have them. That’s all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you’ll never run out.
Let me love you, but don’t love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.
Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair.
some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.
You know what the secret is? It’s so simple. We love one another. We’re nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? – Carmen
She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn’t her parents’ and it wasn’t her friends: It was her own.
She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.
You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It`s you who makes me a person.
When she is happy, she can’t stop talking, when she is sad she doesn’t say a word.
You couldn’t erase the past. You couldn’t even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.
Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.
Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.
I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.
A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting.
Maybe the truth is, there’s a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn’t having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things.
Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.
She didn’t open the envelope until she’d gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn’t given her the thousand dollars she’d asked for-he’d given her ten thousand.
It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.
If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.
You don’t have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want.
They were the sisterhood: their mothers at a younger age.
He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.
They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.
Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.
Tibby, on the other hand, had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Brian striving for the comfort of not knowing.
What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.
Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms.
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn’t change the past. The past was set and sealed.
She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn’t have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?
Bridget wondered whether it all came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly.
She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she’d realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.
You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things
Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn’t get to have.
She was worried these thoughts would crush her if she let them come, but they didn’t. You didn’t know how heavy they were until you tried to lift them. You didn’t know how strong you were.
Bridget’s anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.
We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn’t real.
Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
[Carmen] knew a worse friend would have made her feel better.
When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.
she looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn’t have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her.
This is the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. I you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want.
Healing wasn’t always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.
A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn’t pull forth any one strand.
I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I’d share you, but I told him to remember that you’re my sister. I loved you first. (Riley to her sister Alice about Paul)
But I know this. We’re ready to move forward again in our way. Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.
She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time
People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.
How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?”Eudoxia’s expression grew more serious. “That’s what you’re doing anyway, my dear.
She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.
Someday when you’re twenty, maybe, I’ll see you again. You’ll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I’ll see you and I’ll pray you want me still.
I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.
Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and I’ll show you a girl who can’t put her pants on.-Annik Marchand
I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.
His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.
How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?
The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched.
People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight—at least as the normally experienced them.
Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball.
I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can’t make yourself love someone, can you?
Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.
Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him.
You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.
There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.
She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn’t sure who’d broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one.
She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.
I don’t have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I’ve been able to connect with a lot of people.
The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.