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.

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.

The rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn't do in the Pants --- like picking your nose.

She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.

What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

There are going to be moments of deep, deep doubts, and you have to have faith that your initial idea was good and just muddle through.

Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.