“You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don't why stories worked that way, but they did.”

“It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.”

“Have you worked here long?" Sebastian asks.Just a few months," I say. "Do you come here a lot?" As if you don't know, Jade.I used to come every day, or, you know, when I could, I'd bring Bo after work. Or just myself."At night sometimes. You'd climb the fence. You'd watch the stars. You'd tilt back your head and look at the sky.You'd think it over, whatever it was.”

“You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.”

“Stories help you understand your life,she’d say. Stories can heal. And I think she’s right, because why do old guys back from the war tell their experiences again and again? Why did people of long ago make up elaborate tales of mythical beings? Why do people sit in a room and reveal the pieces of their life to doctors trained to listen, and why are they cured by doing that? Whylibraries? Come on, all those stories, pieces of life told again and again. We need them. Stories are a ritual that put all the crazy shit about life into a form that makes sense. We’re all like the little kids that need to be read the same story over and over again.”

“Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel great distances away from you. You shouldn’t think you needed to set out to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged. Sometimes they were only safe and happy, like Annabelle Aurora. And then other times, it was just possible they were lost at sea. It would be your duty, then, to get out into the boat and search, even if the waves were choppy and the wind was howling the protests of the dead.”

“It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them. Quitting-it was a dirty word...”