And we'd look at each other the way you do when you see someone on the street you think you recognize, but not quite. Someone you wish with all your heart were there but who is actually just a stranger. And you feel a kind of deep longing that hurts like a huge gash and your inability to fix it leaves you frustrated and angry and bone-deep lonely.

I think it shows that sometimes for one person to keep breathing, something else has to stop." (hardcover page 37)

little life lesson 23: before making a snide comment about someone else's outfit, check to see if you're wearing knee boots with fringe. if you answer yes, drop it. just do.

You can only run away from a house. Home is something you run toward.

For some reason my father saw no problem with us pplaying "barbie and ken go to hawaii to save their marriage by picking up another couple for sexy good times," but if barbie and ken had gone to hawaii to "rescue another couple from a crazed kidnapper," that would have been wrong.

I was thinking that maybe when everything around you changed all the time, it was nice to know that something would always be the same

Thinking, not for the first time, that life should come with a trapdoor. Just a little exit hatch you could disappear through when you´d utterly and completely mortified yourself. Or when you had spontaneous zit eruptions. “Good book?” he asked, taking it from her and reading the subtitle, “A Guide for Good Girls Who (Sometimes) Want to Be Bad,” out loud. But life did not come with a trapdoor.