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

by Rachel Cohn

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows;— The happy days unclouded to their close; The sudden joys that out of darkness start As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart Like swallows singing down each wind that blows! White as the gleam of a receding sail, White as a cloud that floats and fades in air, White as the whitest lily on a stream, These tender memories are;—a fairy tale Of some enchanted land we know not where, But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

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?”

“She’ll come,” she assured me. “She doesn’t realize, either, that this isn’t a last, last chance. She’s also a sapling. But that’s the beauty of your young love—you can learn to be trees together.”

“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.”

“It’s not fair,” Lily said, walking over to me and leaning in. “What’s the one thing we want when it comes to the people we love? Time. And what’s the scariest thing about how love goes? Time. The thing we want the most is the thing we fear the most, I guess. Time is going to run out. But in the meantime we have…everything.”