Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem.

If you didn't have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let this world happen to you... he didn't see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and this one slim chance.

There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.