"Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that's all. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live."
This quotation perfectly captures Ezra's fresh outlook on life. After all the terrible things that've happened to him recently, he wants to just sit back and chill for a while. He's trying to make the most of what he has, not allowing life to rob him of joy and enthusiasm like it already has robbed him of so many other things.
"'There's a word for it,' she told me, 'in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.'
'That's a terrible word,' I teased. 'It's like an excuse for holding onto the past.'
'Well, I think it's beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.'"
Cassidy is being eaten up by her regrets. As we later discover, she wishes she had spent her time with her brother better. While Ezra has learned not to dwell on yesterday, he chooses not to because it's painful for him to remember all that he's lost. Here comes this girl whom he loves who cannot stop living in the past. It's a compromising position for both of them mentally and emotionally.
"She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself."
Ezra has fallen in love with Cassidy. After Charlotte left him, Ezra desperately tried to give up on loving another girl, but he was no match for her. She is the fulfillment of his fantasies, the promise that good things do happen in life.
"I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable."
When Cassidy finally explains why she stood him up, Ezra believes they can work it out. He's picturing their future together. Both have endured so much emotionally, but with their mental health in better territory then they can really start developing the relationship. For the first time, Ezra thinks optimistically about the future.
"Because I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I'd never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the greatest disaster of all."
Ezra is realizing that Cassidy was right, he really shouldn't have given her so much credit after his life changed for the better and he figured out who he wanted to be. He now believes that without Cassidy, he still could've made all the decisions that he had made that year and that she wasn't the driving force in his life.
