The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (Dash & Lily #2)

by Rachel Cohn

It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong.

Are you going to be someone who takes charge of her feelings and her actions, even if the outcome might hurt, or someone who lets herself be unhappy simply because she won’t ask for what she wants?”

“People who want things to be perfect are always impossible to please. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Even if their expectations aren’t correct, their instincts are. You won’t get everything right, Dash. Even Lily knows that. The trying is what matters.” “It’s the thought that counts, then.” “Ah, but have you ever tried counting thoughts? They are extraordinarily hard to wrangle.”

people like Tanner are going to tell you other things are pretend. But you know what to say to that? So what. That’s what you tell them. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether the story’s true or not. What matters is the care that’s been put into the story. The love. If something is pretend, that usually means someone has taken the time to build a story for you to live in. And building stories takes a lot of work. And, yes, there will come a time when you’ll see the story isn’t true. But the intentions behind it? Completely true. The love behind it? Also true.”

What an idiot Santa is for flying around alone. Because who would want to travel the world without another person’s heartbeat beside him?

I think that reality has the distinct potential to completely suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality from time to time and find something a little more enjoyable with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy.

“Escape, sure. But it wasn’t so much about getting away, as going to. You can go anywhere in a book. Books are adventure. Knowledge. Possibility. Magic.”

The minute she left the apartment, I missed having her there. But as with all loves, I supposed, the consolation was in the fact that she’d be back.

the older you get, the more you realize that, yes, there are all these things that link you to the past, and you’re using the same words and singing the same songs that have always been there for you, but each time, things have shifted, and you have to deal with that shift.

“We must open our hearts to the downtrodden, and to scoundrels,”