Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.

Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong.

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.

Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if you friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

Shy” was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. “Snotty” was the interpretation she got from people her own age.

He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.

She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn’t imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn’t really imagine it hadn’t.