“While looking one's best was important to my mother, looking natural took precedence.”

“Look natural, that is the best way. Flowers, plants, and animals are all content with how they look—satisfied with nature's endowment. Only human beings are eager to change what nature has given them.”

“My mother did not want to go to America: this much I knew. I knew it by the way she became distracted and impatient with my sister, by the way she stopped tucking us into bed at night. I knew it from watching her feet, which began to shuffle after my father announced the move, as though they threw down invisible roots that needed to be pulled out with each step.”

“It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does - but it still hurt him, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn't see me through the tinted glass. I waved, trying to get his attention as he walked up and down the platform trying to figure out where I was sitting. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he'd seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn't know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back.”

“My father told his acquaintances about that for years, even though both Hannah and I had given up on wormholes and the Child Genius series very soon afterward. That must have made my father sad, as it had made him sad when we stopped being excited about family vacations, when we stopped being open about our interests, and left home and pursued lives of our own. It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does, but it still made him sad, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn't see me through the tinted glass. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he'd seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn't know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back.”

“Childhood is like that, so full of treasures. I've tried to bring as many of those treasures with me, into adulthood, as possible. Otherwise, what is it to be grown? Is learning to die, one day at a time.”

“She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.”