“That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.”

“Love had to be deeper than that, than a glance over tea, which was indicative but not dispositive.”

“He was right: not about her playing him, or about her laughing at him, but certainly about her carelessness, about her casual disregard for how he would feel if he found out, and about the stunning...”

“They'd lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room bra...”

“Yes, look at him," Marisol said. "Sleeping in a hammock, waking before the sunrise to take care of poor people. He is so terrible.”

“Shed pay good money for an up-close-and-personal tour of the tattoos that made him look like a badass biker.”

“...she would have walked all the way up to East Sixty-Third Street, and probably 163rd Street, if it meant pouring even more into this memory that wasn't a memory.”

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed.”

“Sky, wait. The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.”

“I'm not going to do it again," Lena Marquez whispered to the red purse across the hall from her nestle of blankets. "Never again.”