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.

Riley was quiet for a minute. She gathered her blanket all around her. "Paul always loved you, Alice. He knows I know that. I know he loves me, too. But it's different." Alice opened her mouth, but nothing came out at first. "He loved me once. But I think that part is over," she said slowly. "No, it's not. It hasn't even begun." Riley took Alice's bare foot in her hand and squeezed it. "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."

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.

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.

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.

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.