When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you'll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.

Are you coming down with something?" Mom asks. And just for the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I'm not the girl in the catalog at all. I'm not a Happy College Student. I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides. Which I think is a rather handy metaphor for falling in love.

And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.

My first impulse is not to grab her or kiss her or yell at her. I simple want to touch her cheek, still flushed from the night's performance. I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet-not miles, not continents, not years-and to take a callused finger to her face.