“In America when someone asks me my nationality, I can't just say American. I have to go back generations, elaborate on there in Europe my ancestors were from. But here, I can just say it, Je suis Americaine. It feels good.”

“I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.”

“This mountain, the arched back of the earth risen before us, it made me feel humble, like a beggar, just lucky to be here at all, even briefly.”

“This was how the world persisted. The heaviness of despair - how could it exist in the midst of mascara, zippers, brunches ? It marched forward even when I was barely able to stand....It had been hard on all of us - not only missing Henry, but facing the idea that your whole world can change, suddenly irreversibly. We were reminded how flimsy everything is, as frail as the airmail envelopes my mother had sent us the summer she disappeared. This is the life you have and then it's gone. I felt sorry for my mother, I knew what it was like not to be able to help your child, to change the incomprehensible randomness of life, to reverse a loss.”

“I'd heard about the traffic accidnet on the radio after I'd dropped Abbot off at school. I heard about the accident, that there were mutiple fatalities, an oil tanker ablaze, and the backed-up traffic on the interstate, and I had one simple though : I would take an alternate route. That was it, I would take an alternate route. Worse, I felt lucky - not because I was alive and others were dead but because I'd caught the update in time to avoid the exit ramp that would have landed me in he thick of it.”

“We were new then, our lives stretched out before us. Our families had let us go. Abbott had yet to find us. For this very short time, it would be just the two of us - just two kids.”

“I'm the kind of Flying Wallenda who prays for a good net. That's all. Just a good net.”