Quotes from Rachel Cohn

I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning.

To be the right person at the right time for someone else is the highest service we can perform

Our love had been liking; our feelings had been ordinary, not Shakespearean. I still felt fondness for her—fondness, that pleasant, detached mix of admiration and sentiment, appreciation and nostalgia.

Dash believed in magic. Dash loved Christmas. Dash loved me!

We've already established my position on dillying and dallying, which right now is chaste with a chance for inveterate lust, depending on the ripeness of our first interactions.

One of the failures of cellular communication is that tiredness often comes across as sadness. But I appreciate your concern.

The girl is dressed in a flannel shirt, and I can't tell whether that's because she's trying to bring back the only fashion style of the past fifty years that hasn't been brought back or whether it's because the shirt is as damn comfortable as it looks.

When I was old enough to read and write, my parents gave me an eraser board that I kept in my room at all times. The idea was that when frustrated, I, Lily, should write down words on the board to express my feelings instead of letting she-devil Shrilly express them through shrieking. It was supposed to be a therapeutic tool.

My hands were starting to shake a little. Because I hadn't known that I knew these things. Just having a notebook to write them in, and having someone to write them to, made them all rise to the surface.

How can you not be concerned that I might have cancer?" I ask. "I found a lump on my breast." Touch it, Ely. Touch it. "Lie. Not only are you biting your lip, which you always do when you lie, but your mom told me about the alleged lump in the elevator this morning. The doctor said it was an overgrown pimple." Monkeys!

The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart.

Driver, can you tell him that I'm sorry? I wasn't supposed to be like this. I swear.

The Strand proudly proclaims itself as home to eighteen miles of books. I have no idea how this is calculated. Does one stack all the books on top of each other to get the eighteen miles? Or do you put them end to end, to create a bridge between Manhattan and, say, Short Hills, New Jersey, eighteen miles away? Were there eighteen miles of shelves? No one knew. We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn't trust a bookstore, what could you trust? Whatever

Game over," you say, and I don't know which I take more exception to—the fact that you say that it's over, or the fact that you say it's a game. It's only over when one of us keeps the notebook for good. It's only a game if there is an absence of meaning. And we've already gone too far for that.   Only

Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they're very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny.

We met in the park to wrest the afternoon into the shape of a stroll.

She's cinematic and I'm a fucking sitcom.

The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn't as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the fabric seemed soaked in wine. Knee-high sculptures perched in corners and by the fireplace, while jacketless books crowded on shelves, peering down like old professors too tired to speak to one another.

I think it's time to experience life outside the notebook.

The Velmas of the world do not intern at CNN, hope to be accepted at Columbia J-School after graduating NYU with honors, and go on to win Pulitzer Prizes by getting bogged down in relationship drama. That's a problem for the Daphnes of the world. Daphne, you bitch, you can't even drive the damn van.

Perhaps this was what was so unnerving about Lily at this moment—the trust that was required in what we were doing.

Unfortunately, now that Langston has a boyfriend again, he has forgotten all about me.

He can sometimes act a bit loner-ish, but I think that's not because he's some serial killer waiting to happen; he's just his own best company sometimes. And he's comfortable with that. I guess there's nothing wrong with that.

You mean I'm not lazy? No bitch, I mean you intimidate guys with a look or a comment before they can even decide if they have a chance with you. You're so judgmental. Along with frigid.