Jonathan Safran Foer

• "Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
• "I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else."
• "If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
• "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
• "I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
• "Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
• "I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
• "I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
• "I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
• "When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible."
• "I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
• "She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
• "It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
• "One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family."
• "Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war."
• "... I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything."
• "There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me."
• "What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
• "He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."
• "She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary."
• "Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
• "She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."
• "I never confused what I had with what I was."
• "I am doing what I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love."
• "Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?"

Stephen Chbosky

• "We accept the love we think we deserve."
• "Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody."
• "So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them."
• "There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons."
• "I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have."
• "It's just that I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too."
• "Enjoy it. Because it's happening."
• "And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it's enough. I really do because they've made me happy. And I'm only one person."
• "We didn't talk about anything heavy or light. We were just there together. And that was enough."
• "I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning."
• "It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and than make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit their and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. And I'm going to figure out what that is. And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn't do or what they didn't know. I don't know. I guess there could always be someone to blame. It's just different. Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it's okay to feel things. I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. I feel infinite."
• "I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there."
• "I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me."
• "You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things."

John Connolly

• "For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be."
• "Each man dreams his own heaven."
• "Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, books had no real existence in our world. Like seeds in the beak of a bird waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. they lie dormant hoping for the chance to emerge.They want us to give them life."
• "Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother."
• "I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?"

John Keats

• "I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."
• "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."
• "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination."
• "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Maggie Stiefvater

• "You're beautiful and sad," I said finally, not looking at him when I did. "Just like your eyes. You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again." For a long moment there was only the whirring sound of the tires on the road, and then Sam said softly, "Thank you."
• "It is possible to be in love with you just because of who you are."
• "Books are more real when you read them outside."
• "I'd found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold."
• "I stood on my toes and stole a soft kiss from his lips. "Surprise attack," I said. Sam leaned down and kissed me back, his mouth lingering on mine, teeth grazing my lower lip, making me shiver. "Surprise attack back."

"Sneaky," I said, my voice breathier than I intended."

• "As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air."
• "This is a love story. I never knew there were so many kinds of love or that love could make people do so many different things.

I never knew there were so many ways to say good-bye."

• "You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again."
• "I won't let this be my good-bye. I've folded one thousand paper crane memories of me and Grace, and I've made my wish.

I will find a cure. And then I will find Grace."

• "Hope hurt more than the cold."
• "Some days seem to fit together like a stained glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture."
• "She kissed me harder, breath huffing into my mouth, and bit my lip. Oh, hell that was amazing. I growled before I could stop myself."
• "His lips tasted cool and sharp, peppermint, winter, but his hands, soft on the back of my neck, promised long days and summer and forever."
• "I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you're not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was really a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me."
• "Right now, it's hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world."
• "For once in my life, I was here and nowhere else."
• "I folded myself against her body, breathing in the smell of my new life and matching my heartbeat to hers."
• "To Grace, these were the things that mattered: my hands on her cheeks, my lips on her mouth. The fleeting touches that meant I loved her."
• "I had this feeling that he and I , in this moment, were a car crash, and instead of putting on the brakes, I was hitting the accelerator."
• "I couldn't imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it."
• "He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark. It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years."
• "Because you know that's not how you want it to end. You know I'd love to have you with me, and it will be that way, one day. But this isn't the way it ought to happen."
• "It was the perfect moment to tell her. This is my last year. But I couldn’t say it. Not yet. I wanted another minute, another hour, another night of pretending this wasn’t the end."
• "I am alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make each hour holy. I am lowly in this world, and yet not lowly enough for me to be just a thing to you, dark and shrewd. I want my will and I want to go with my will as it moves towards action. And I want, in those silent, somehow faltering times, to be with someone who knows, or else alone. I want to reflect everything about you, and I never want to be too blind or too ancient to keep your profound wavering image with me. I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because there, where I'm folded, I am a lie."
• "You could write a book about things that you can't find online."
• "Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn't underneath it."
• People don't change who they are. They only change what they do with it."
• "People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty."
• "Suddenly, Shelby started, at the same time that we heard Cole's voice across the backyard: "Clear off, you psychotic bitch!"

She slid off into the darkness as the back door slammed. "Thanks, Cole," I said. "That was incredibly subtle." "That," replied Cole, "is one of my finest traits."

• "Sam Roth, you bastard," Cole said. There was admiration in his voice, which probably meant I'd made a poor decision."
• "I hated this. I hated knowing what I wanted and knowing what was right and knowing they weren't the same thing."
• "I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the basement."
• "There is no better taste than this: someone else's laughter in your mouth."
• "In the darkness, he is invisible, but I can still feel him beside me. Sometimes you don't have to see something to know it is there."
• "She attempted to turn again; I held on. I wasn't holding tight enough to keep her, but she wasn't pulling hard enough to get away."
• "While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”

I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention. “There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face. My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?” “Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?” “No,” I said. Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.” This was shocking. I didn’t ask a question, but I tilted toward him. “And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.” I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable. “You don’t believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.” “Brain tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all. Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don’t have to look at those sad things anymore. I could open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.” “How did you use the brain tape?” “You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won’t trip over them when you’re thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?” I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open. “Mom,” I whispered. I wasn’t looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow. “What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear. “The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …” My fingers were on my scars. Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn’t move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken. “Me,” I said."

• "For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter

that only be wintering through it will your heart survive. - Rilke"

• "Poor bastards," Cole said, his gaze still on the stars."they must get pretty tired of watching us make the same damn mistakes all the time."
• "I'd learned a long time ago that one of the finest weapons in my arsenal was my ability to invade personal space."
• "It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you'd relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays."
• "The thing I was beginning to figure out about Sam and Grace, the thing about Sam not being able to function without her, was that that sort of love only worked when you were sure both people would always be around for each other. If one half of the equation left, or died, or was slightly less perfect in their love, it became the most tragic, pathetic story invented, laughable in its absurdity. Without Grace, Sam was a joke without a punch line."
• "I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.

I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?"

• "Where are Sam and Grace?"

"Ringo left in his car a few hours ago. He must've taken Grace with him. I don't know where they went." "You didn't ask?" "We're not married" Cole said, and added, in a more humble tone, "yet"."

• "You're the nicest boy ever,", I told him, feeling undeserving and terrible. "You didn't have to get me anything. I like thinking about you thinking about me when I'm not around."
• "You're assuming they would listen to me," I said.

Cole lifted his hands off the roof of the Volkswagen; cloudy fingerprints evaporated seconds ater he did. "We all listen to you, Sam." He jumped to the pavement. "You just don't always talk to us."

• "I always listen to you. Except when I don't."
• "Cole sat back up, slowly, and I opened my eyes. His expression, as ever, was blank, the face he wore when something mattered. He said, "That's how I would kiss you, if I loved you."
• "Overhead, the stars were wheeling and infinite, a complicated mobile made by giants."
• "He sounded absolutely miserable. “Are you ever going to speak to me?"
• "Are you high? Why are you never wearing a shirt?"

"I sleep naked," Cole said. He put both milk and sugar in my coffee. "As the day goes on, I put on more and more clothing. You should've come over an hour ago."

• "The boy had my wolf's eyes."
• "Rilke said: This is what Fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite to every thing and nothing else but opposite and always opposite."
• "Some people see what they want to see."
• "It wasn’t a touch that said I need more. It was a touch that said I want this."
• "
  
  t was the knowledge that I was surrounded by adults with lives that I could never imagine living. It was the humming noise inside me that told me to do something and found nothing to do that meant anything, the bit of me that was like a fly smashing itself again and again on a windowpane. It was the futility of aging. ... It was the realization that this was life, and I didn't belong here."
• "There was something striking about her posture; something about the tilt to her head. She was like a beautiful and lonely piece of art, lovely but unreachable."
• "Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths."
• "It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar -- maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless -- and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts."
• "It was one frayed rope thrown across the chasm between us. Not enough to get across, but maybe just enough to tell that it wasn't as wide as I'd originally thought."
• "The room went dark and, after a moment, Grace whispered that she loved me, sounding a little sad. I wrapped my arms tightly around her shoulders, sorry that loving me was such a complicated thing."
• "It just makes me tired even thinking about it. It reminds me of that feeling I had before I left. Like my lungs were made of lead. Like I can't even think about starting to care about anything. Like I either wish that they were all dead, or I was, because I can't stand the pull of all that history between us. That's before I even pick up the phone. I'm so tired I never want to wake up again. But I've figured out now that it was never them that made me feel that way. It was just me, all along."
• "When we kissed, it didn't matter that I had been a wolf hours ago, or that I would be a wolf again. It didn't matter that a thousand snares were laid for us as soon as we left this moment. All that mattered was this: our noses touching, the softness of his mouth, the ache inside me."
• "I was against felonies when a misdemeanor would do."
• "I didn't understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?"
• "Sorry for hurting you, she said right in my ear, but it wasn't really an apology, because you don't bite someone's earlobe to tell them you're sorry."
• "That was pretty much all you needed to know about Cole, right there. He saw something he didn't quite understand, liked it, and took it to be his."

Sylvia Plath

• "Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
• "Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
• "If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed."
• "I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
• "Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
• "There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour."
• "I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give."

Richelle Mead

• "You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love."
• "I’d said it before and meant it: Alive or undead, the love of my life was a badass."
• "The only thing better than imagining Dimitri carrying me in his arms was imagining him shirtless while carrying me in his arms."
• "You will lose what you value most, so treasure it while you can."
• "I know how devastated you must be to miss me, but leave a message, and I'll try to ease your agony"
• "There's nothing worse than waiting and not knowing what'll happen to you. Your own imagination can be crueler than any captor."
• "Okay, God, I thought. Get me out of this and I’ll stop my half-assed church-going ways. You got me past a pack of Strigoi tonight. I mean, trapping that one between the doors really shouldn't have worked, so clearly you're on board. Let me get out of here, and I’ll...I don’t know. Donate Adrian’s money to the poor. Get baptized. Join a convent. Well, no. Not that last one."

John Green

• "The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive."
• "Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."
• "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once."
• “So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
• “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
• “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”
• “When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
• “That's the thing about pain...it demands to be felt.”
• “What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
• “I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
• “What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
• "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
• “Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were: 'I go to seek a Great Perhaps.' That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”
• “The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
• “That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
• “At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
• “It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
• “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

Rainbow Rowell

• “Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
• “Holding Eleanor's hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.”
• “He was quiet. He wanted everything she'd just said to be the last thing he heard. He wanted to fall asleep with 'I want you' in his ears.”
• “I just want to break that song into pieces and love them all to death.”
• “I just can’t believe that life would give us to each other,’ he said, ‘and then take it back.’

‘I can,’ she said. ‘Life’s a bastard.”

• “'You can be Han Solo,' he said, kissing her throat. 'And I'll be Boba Fett. I'll cross the sky for you.'”
• “He made her feel like more than the sum of her parts.”
• “'What do you want to show me?'

'Nothing, really. I just want to be alone with you for a minute.'

He pulled her to the back of the driveway, where they were almost completely hidden by a line of trees and the RV and the garage.

'Seriously?' she said. 'That was so lame.'

'I know,' he said, turning to her. 'Next time, I'll just say, "Eleanor, follow me down this dark alley, I want to kiss you".'

She didn't roll her eyes. She took a breath, then closed her mouth. He was learning how to catch her off guard.

She pushed her hands deeper in her pockets, so he put his hands on her elbows. 'Next time,' he said, 'I'll just say, "Eleanor, duck behind these bushes with me, I'm going to lose my mind if I don't kiss you".'

She didn't move, so he thought it was probably okay to touch her face. Her skin was as soft as it looked, white and smooth as freckled porcelain.

'I'll just say, "Eleanor, follow me down this rabbit hole...".'

He laid his thumb on her lips to see if she'd pull away. She didn't. He leaned closer. He wanted to close his eyes, but he didn't trust her not to leave him standing there.”

• “..I love your name. I don't want to cheat myself out of a single syllable.”
• “My girlfriend is sad and quiet and keeps me up all night worrying about her.”