BAWL! I couldn't put this down. Ann Brashares writes so compellingly about the motivations of different personality types. I identify so strongly with Lena, yet am glad for insight into a character like Bridget. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 ""Nobody could accuse you of being boring" was what he often said when he got that look. And frankly, having somebody like Bridget around was what Eric needed, because he was prone to habits and ruts and he knew it. Who else got him out to street festivals, free concerts, bike-a-thons, and community gardening projects? Who else got him to try surfing and jujitsu and the leggy, oily creatures they served at the restaurants in deepest Chinatown?" 
 "Sometimes she felt that the outside of her gave a very incomplete account of the inside of her." 
 "A wedding was an opportunity for control. You could present yourself and your life and your husband-to-be exactly as you chose, and there would be a million pictures to document it. For as long as you lived you could imagine that your wedding was what you really were and not just what you labored and paid to have it look like." 
 "People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe because she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same." 
 "You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this.... Ready?" "Ready." " 'At least I tried.' " 
 When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them. --Evelyn Waugh 
 "But Effie hadn't meant faith in Kostos, Lena realized. Not faith that Kostos would be there to meet her and throw his arms around her and want her more than anyone else. Effie meant faith in herself. Faith that even if he didn't come, she would be all right. She had to have faith not just in trying, but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail? Was she strong enough not to?" 
 And you cannot go on 
 indefinitely being 
 just an ordinary, 
 decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. 
 --C. S. Lewis