Please may this not be a game. Please may this not be a game. Because if it’s a game, I know I’m going to lose.

this might be the happy ending without the ending

But I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to find her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding each other.

Are you going to be playing for the pure thrill of unreluctant desire?

If smart people are parodying it, that's a sure sign that some less smart people are believing it.

It’s up to you, not fate. True. But it was also up to Lily. That was the trickiest part.

Holden Caulfield is the embodiment of what we mean by the phrase “young adult” – too young to be a grown-up, but too wise to the world to be completely innocent. He’s caught in the in-between, and that in-between is what all young adult authors write about.