“You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn't that weird? Water causes something to burn.”

“But he just stared at my eyes, as if searching for a stray eyelash. A free wish.”

“I couldn’t tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if he’d look up and see the planes crossing the sky like shooting stars, knowing one of those lights was me.”

“Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It's all the same, really. All bullshit.”

“We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it’s causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little.”

“If you think you can stand looking and not touching for eight months, you're welcome to try.""Try' being the operative word," he said, sighing. "No, I can't. And I don't want to try.”

“I was so sure this was different, the kind of story they made movies and books about, but in the end it was just a summer to a summer, a dizzying breath of honeysuckle and whiskey and candle smoke, inhaled, held, let go.”

“Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.”

“Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you're gorgeous, you're fearless and unpredictable, you're a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes.”

“Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.”

“The whole summer was inside of us.”