“I don’t like to overhear things, because, in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don’t want to know.”

“Watching people is a good hobby, but you have to be careful about it. You can’t let people catch you staring at them. If people catch you, they treat you like a first-class criminal. And maybe they’re right to do that. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don’t want you to see.”

“Once you know a thing you can’t ever unknow it.”

“Don’t you see? It’s like we’ve known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It’s like there’s been this . . . this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn’t know that was me, but it was.”

“The real question for me is why Lieutenant Cable and Nellie didn’t just get together. Because they would have been a perfect match. I guess the idea is that opposites attract, but I don’t think that’s what it’s like in real life. I think in real life you’d want someone who was as close to you as possible. Someone who could understand exactly the way you thought.”

“I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.”

“Opening a present from a live person was scary enough. There was always the chance that the gift might be so wrong, so completely not the kind of thing you liked, that you'd realize they didn't really know you at all.”