“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions”

“We stood-- the dead child and the living --on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.”

“You look invincible,' my mother said one night.I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:I am.”

“If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.”

“After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside.~pg 17”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

“Above his bed the clock ticked off the minutes and I thought of the game Lindsey and I had played in the yard together: “he loves me/he loves me not” picked out on daisy’s petals. I could hear the clock casting my own two greatest wishes back to me in the same rhythm: “Die for me/don’t die for me, die for me/don’t die for me.” I could not help myself, it seemed, as I tore at his weakening heart. If he died, I would have him forever. Was this so wrong to want?We stood-the dead child and living-on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.”