Life can change in an instant; don't be so worried about the future that you forget to celebrate what you have right now.

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

I think there are two different oceans - the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter.