Rainbow Rowell

I’m sort of… coming off a bad relationshipWhen did it end?Slightly before it started.

Holding Eleanor's hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.

You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you'll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away.Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.

He's still looking in my eyes. Staring me down like he did that dragon, chin tilted and locked. "I'm not the Chosen One," he says.I meet his gaze and sneer. My arm is a steel band around his waist. "I choose you," I say. "Simon Snow, I choose you."

What are the chances you’d ever meet someone like that? he wondered. Someone you could love forever, someone who would forever love you back? And what did you do when that person was born half a world away? The math seemed impossible.

If you can’t save your own life, is it even worth saving?

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

You were the sun, and I was crashing into you.

Well, she said. I’m frustrated.Don’t make me angry-kiss you.Give me the laundry.Tempers rising, faces flushed … This is how it happens.

Every woman wants a man who'll fall in love with her soul as well as her body.

It was the nicest thing she could imagine. It made her want to have his babies and give him both of her kidneys.

I love you more than I hate everything else.

She wanted to lose herself in him. To tie his arms around her like a tourniquet.If she showed him how much she needed him, he'd run away.

Happily ever after, or even just together ever after, is not cheesy, Wren said. It’s the noblest, like, the most courageous thing two people can shoot for.

I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.

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.

I believe that worrying about a bad thing prepares you for it when it comes. If you worry, the bad thing doesn't hit you as hard. You can roll with the punch if you see it coming.

It's more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you hope that that person is the one—and then at some point, you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you're right.