The Reading Room

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

“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.”

“Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.”

“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.”

“You know, when it works, love is pretty amazing. It's not overrated. There's a reason for all those songs.”

“You should never be surprised when someone treats you with respect, you should expect it.”

“No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.”

“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.”

“Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.”

“Oh darling, don't be bitter. It's the first instinct of the weak.”

“You know, when it works, love is amazing. It's not overrated.”

“It's just that...I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is.”

“Don't be a fool. Don't give up something important to hold onto someone who can't even say they love you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Here was a boy who liked flaws, who saw them not as failings but as strengths. Who knew such a person could exist, or what would have happened if we'd found each other under different circumstances? Maybe in a perfect world. But not in this one.”

“If something doesn't work exactly right, or maybe needs some special treatment, you don't just throw it away. Everything can't be fully operational all the time. Sometimes, we need to have the patience to give something the little nudge it needs.”

“It all counts,' Adam said again. 'And the bottom line is, what defines you isn't how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back on the bike. As long as it's one more, you're all good.-pg 325 Along for the Ride”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?”

“The future was one thing that could never be broken, because it had not yet had the chance to be anything.”

“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.”

“Love is so unpredictable. That's what makes it so great.”

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

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

“I don't get it,' Caroline said, bemused. 'She's the only one with wings. Why is that?' There were so many questions in life. You couldn't ever have all the answers. But I knew this one. It's so she can fly,' I said. Then I started to run.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn't make you strong. if anything, it makes you weaker. Because you're doing it out of fear.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. We had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, and the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You can't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build your world from it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's a lot easier to be lost than found. It's the reason we're always searching and rarely discovered--so many locks not enough keys.”

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

“I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.”

“I've changed in my sympathies since I've become a mother myself. In high school I went through a period where I was close with my mom and had to break with her in order to find myself and come back. Since that was my experience, that's often what happens in my books.”

“I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I've spent in Chapel Hill, N.C.”

“That first love. And the first one who breaks your heart. For me, they just happen to be the same person.”

“Well, it's true that I have been hurt in my life. Quite a bit. But it's also true that I have loved, and been loved. and that carries a weight of its own. A greater weight, in my opinion. It's like that pie chart we talked about earlier. in the end, I'll look back on my life and see that the greatest piece of it was love. The problems, the divorces, the sadness... those will be there too, but just smaller slivers, tiny pieces.”

“Yeah. I mean, acknowledging is easy. Something happened or it didn't. But understanding... that's where things get sticky.”

“You know the minute you stop thinking about it, it'll happen.”

“You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.”