This weekend, I did something a busy college student who loves to read only dreams of doing. Not for a class assignment or for a career-building goal, but for myself, I had the time to read an enjoyable book from beginning to end in one sitting. I savored my butterfly-filled-stomach, heart-aching moments and light-hearted laughs with Taylor Jenkins Reid's new-adult novel, One True Loves. (Even though 29 lines seem like a spoiler, I made sure they wouldn't be! The book is a pretty good size.) From the deep, heartfelt quotes and delicious food descriptions to the humorous lines the characters end up saying, here are my favorite lines from One True Loves:
1. “The bags under her eyes look like the pocket on a kangaroo.”
2. “It’s rare that you love the person who loves you, that you love only the person who loves only you. Otherwise, somebody is heartbroken. But I guess that’s why true love is so alluring in the first place. It’s hard to find and hold on to, like all beautiful things. Like gold, saffron, or an aurora borealis.”
3. “The sandwich is gooey in the center and crunchy on the outside. The soup is sweet with just a little bit of spice.”
4.“Maybe, if you’re the kind of person who’s willing to give all of yourself, the kind of person who is willing to love with all of your heart even though you’ve experienced just how much it can hurt...maybe you get lots of true loves, then. Maybe that’s the gift you get for being brave.”
5. “It’s messy to love after heartbreak. It’s painful and it forces you to be honest with yourself about who you are. You have to work harder to find the words for your feelings, because they don’t fit into any prefabricated boxes. But it’s worth it.”
6. “...I find my days-old sandwich sitting in the front seat. It has already given my car a sour, acrid odor.”
7. “The pierce shot through me like a shock. I wasn’t sure which was worse: the pressure of the squeeze, the pain of the puncture, or the sting of the air on a fresh wound.”
8. “My parents have given me an incredible gift: they gave me this store, and they set up a future for me, but they never told me theirs was the only way to do it.”
9. “They look at each other and smile, as if they are part of a two-man club that knew this is what I’d do all along. [...]Because after all, they are my parents. And when you get to be old enough, it’s finally OK to admit that they often do know best.”
10. “I know those footprints will be gone soon. I know they might not make it to tonight if it keeps snowing like this. But it feels good to be able to look at something and understand it. The footprints start off together and they grow apart.”
11. Jesse laughed. “Maybe. We could escape out of here. Go all Bonnie and Clyde.” I wondered if he knew Bonnie and Clyde were lovers. I thought about telling him.
12. “Emma, what are you doing here?” she says. “You scared us half to death.”
“I left a note on the kitchen table!”
“Emma our apologies. The next time we fear we are being attacked in the night, we will first check the kitchen table for a note.”
13. “The future is so hard to predict. If I had a time machine, would it even make a difference to try to go back there and explain to my young self what was ahead?”
14. “I love waking up with you on Sunday mornings when we don’t have any plans. And I love coming home to you at night, seeing you reading a book, bundled up in a sweater and huge socks even though you have the heat up to eighty-eight degrees. I want that for the rest of my life. I want you to be my wife. That’s what I want.”
15. “He’s finally ready to say how he really feels and it’s all spilling out of him like a turned-over gallon of milk.”
16. “Now, my favorite day of the year is when daylight savings begins. It’s usually when the air starts to thaw and the only precipitation you can be threatened with is a little rain. You’re tired in the morning because you’ve lost an hour of sleep. But by seven o’clock at night, the sun is still out. And it’s warmer than it was yesterday at that time. It feels like the world is opening up, like the worst is over, and the flowers are coming. They don’t have that in Los Angeles. The flowers never leave.”
17. "Do you think he’s OK?” Olive says. “I mean, I know he’s alive and they say he’s healthy enough, but [...]Three years alone? He was probably living off of coconuts and talking to volleyballs.”
18. “Good things don’t wait until you’re ready. Sometimes they come right before, when you’re almost there. And I figured when that happens, you can let them pass by like a bus not meant for you. Or you can get ready.”
19. “You don’t even know why you’re breaking down. Nothing about Shel Silverstein reminds you of Jesse. Except that Shel Silverstein wrote about what it meant to be alive and you feel like you aren’t alive anymore. Because Jesse isn’t. You feel like you stopped living when he went missing. You feel like the rest of your days are killing time until it’s time to die.”
20. “She pronounces ‘library’ as ‘libry,’ calls water fountains ‘bubblahs,’ and leaves work on time so she’s not late for ‘suppah.’ Boston accents are warm and cozy and wonderful to me.”
21. “I ring up a woman for $16.87 and when she hands me a twenty-dollar bill, I give her $16.87 back.”
22. “It’s like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body.”
23. “Do you ever get over loss? Or do you just find a box within yourself, big enough to hold it? Do you just stuff it in there, push it down, and snap the lid on it? Do you just work, every day to keep that box shut? I thought that maybe if I shoved the pain in there hard enough and I kept the box shut tight enough that the pain would evaporate on its own, that I’d open the box one day to find it was empty and all of the pain I thought I’d been carrying with me was gone.”
24. “When he disappeared, I kept his hairbrush for months.”
25. “Now I wonder if grief isn’t something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you’ve outgrown it. So you put it down.”
26. “And what has confused me ever since I found out he was alive is now crystal clear: We are two people who are madly in love with our old selves. And that is not the same as being in love. You can’t capture love in a bottle. You can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you.”
27. “This is not just butter!” [...] Butter butter is pale yellow. This butter is yellow yellow.”“All I just heard was, ‘butter butter yellow butter yellow yellow.’”
28. “Falling out of love with someone you still like feels exactly like lying in a warm bed and hearing the alarm clock. No matter how good you feel right now, you know it’s time to go.”
29. "I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there's a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some even that changed you, changed your life, more than others." A moment that creates a 'before' and an 'after.'"
