Quotes from Tara Altebrando

I felt sort of sad that I couldn't remember the last time, before tonight, that I'd paid such close attention to the sky. It felt like that must be some kind of sign that I'd lost my innocence and grown up without even realizing it.

I knew guys got erections. I was perfectly prepared to deal with it. When the right guy and the right erection came along.

People who were gone only lived on in your memory if you had memories. Why hadn't she held on tighter?

It's wonderful," his mother says, and I feel something old and familiar course through my blood. It fills all four chambers of my heart, and I think maybe, just maybe, it's happiness.

We'd had a bunch of classes together over the years, but I couldn't be sure we'd ever spoken one-on-one and now that made me sad.

It was enough to make me feel like retreating into some wooded or snowy clime, where only the most determined photographers or Mary-hunters might find me.

You always think the best of me,' I said, squeezing water from my hair. 'Even when you shouldn't.' 'That's what love is,' he said, and he got up and walked inside.

There were things worth keeping and things worth letting go of, and figuring out which was which wasn't that easy." -Jane

Like any collectable of any real value, it's priceless to the right owner" -Mr. Simmons

We are all dust All dying All losing All forgetting We are all leaving all the time

He wanted more than anything, to walk over the bridge. To just leave Oyster Point and go to college in the city, where maybe people were different. But he also said that he was afraid that if he set out to cross that bridge, he might not make it to the other end without giving in to the temptation to jump and just be done with it.

You can't just give up on a movie during the dark night of the soul, he'd said. What's that? I asked. That's the point in a film when all hope is lost and the protagonists must dig deeper than ever before to prevail against the odds stacked against them.

It's impossible to explain, isn't it? Why anyone likes anyone or anything? You just do. You're saying that you're not responsible for who you like? Nora asks. Yeah, I say. I guess? I mean it's either there or it isn't right?

Sick with the impossibility of it all, with the reality of how small a person is. How at any second you can get struck down by a bullet or a tree; how a person can look so very tiny against the world, how each of us is nothing more than a speck

It's just not always that easy, right? To control what you think about. Who you think about.

Her hair was a dried-out cornfield and her skin a worn leather handbag. She had resting bitch face, so I knew where I'd gotten it from.

Every time the woman turned her head, it was like she was posing for a picture with an Instagram setting that filtered out humility.

EVERYONE HAS A HOLY PLACE, A REFUGE, WHERE THEIR HEARTS ARE PURER, THEIR MINDS CLEARER WHERE THEY FEEL CLOSE TO GOD, OR LOVE, OR TRUTH OR WHEREVER IT IS THEY HAPPEN TO WORSHIP.

I itched to have my phone in my hands so I could . . . I didn't even know what. I wanted distraction. I wanted a Hermione Time-Turner. I

The world was so big! Her life story so huge in it. The stuff of movies! And yet her part in it all felt so small. One tiny stitch.

She told me once that she sometimes feels caught between two worlds at school -like she has to decide who she is instead of just being who she is.

I like being surprised by someone. Surprised, too, by myself.

We are all dust.

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black/ It's hard to dance with the devil on your back/ They buried my body and they thought I'd gone/ But I am the Dance and I still go on.