“I wonder what it’s like to have that much power over a boy. I don’t think I’d want it; it’s a lot of responsibility to hold a person’s heart in your hands.”
“Margot would say she belongs to herself. Kitty would say she belongs to no one. And I guess I would say I belong to my sisters and my dad, but that won’t always be true. To belong to someone - I didn’t know it, but now that I think about it, it seems like that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To really be somebody’s , and to have them be mine.”
“But I don’t want him. I want someone else. It feels strange to have spent so much time wishing for something, for someone, and then one day, suddenly, to just stop.”
“I’ve never gotten a love letter before. But reading these notes like this, one after the other, it feels like I have. It’s like...it’s like there’s only ever been Peter. Like everyone else that came before him, they were all to prepare me for this.”
“There is a specific kind of fight you can only have with your sister. It’s the kind where you say things you can’t take back. You say them because you can’t help but say them, because you’re so angry it’s coming up in your throat and out your eyes; you’re so angry you can’t see straight. All you see is blood.”
“He looks at me in such a way that I know for sure-he’s never looked at another girl quite like this.
And then I’m in his arms, and we’re hugging and kissing, and we’re both shaking, because we both know-this is the night we become real.”
“There’s a Korean word my grandma taught me. It’s called jung. It’s the connection between two people that can’t be severed, even when love turns to hate. You still have those old feelings for them; you can’t ever completely shake them loose of you; you will always have tenderness in your heart for them.”
“I want to say, I never cared about your past. But that isn’t true. It’s only then that I realize: Peter wasn’t the one who needed to get over Genevieve. It was me. All this time with Peter, I’ve been comparing myself to her, all the ways I don’t measure up. All the ways our relationship pales next to theirs. I’m the one who couldn’t let her go. I’m the one who didn’t give us a chance.”
“I think he would have stayed with her forever, trying to figure out the mystery. He was a puzzle solver, the kind of person who likes theorems, theories. X always had to equal something. It couldn’t just be X.”
“The air tasted just the same, smelled just the same. The wind making my hair feel sticky, the salty sea breeze, all of it felt just right. Like it had been waiting for me to get there.”
“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”
“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”
“To me, my mother wasn’t that mysterious. She was my mother. Always reasonable, always sure of herself. To me, she was about as mysterious as a glass of water. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn’t want.”