“I am the creation of all the rivers I have known and the knowledge they've instilled: I am constant, adaptable, and strong-willed.”

“I don't get it, if there was a closet full of gay guys, then why would any of them want to "come out of the closet?”

“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.”

“To him food was identity, culture, family, how you define home and love and who you are - all of it at once....It's not just the pie. It's the chemistry and physics. It's place and time and history and religion and music...I felt blurred by his presence, overwhelmed with double vision - the world as I was seeing it and the world as Henry would have.”

“...almost like they had sucked up all the air in the room, and I was left oxygen-deprived. But with Henry, I had air again, I could breathe. He thought I was funny, and so I got funnier. He thought I was beautiful, and so I felt more beautiful. He thought I was experimental in the kitchen, and so I experimented more brilliantly. We had our problems, yes, but even our problems bound us closer. And now I knew what it was like to be only half of a pair and less of myself.”

“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'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.”