“One thing I've learned is that strange things do happen. They happen all the time. Today, for instance, my best friend Jill's cat spoke. We were making brownies in the kitchen when we heard it say, 'Let me out.”

“If you'd had all the experiences I've had, you'd know that there are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and just let them happen.”

“There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.”

“It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.”

“I've wanted this for so long."Emmaline thought that a lovely thing to say. "We barely know each other.""No. We've known each other forever, my dearest one, always known the other of us was out there somewhere in the world, waiting. We only just happened to meet today.”

“All of my best friends are dead people. Someday I've got to figure out how that happened.”