“You are like Odysseus, who could go out onto the great sea, lose all his goods and his friends, come to the boundaries of death, and return still himself.”

“Was it possible—was it at all possible that she could come out of her most desperate choice with a man as clever as Odysseus who looked like Achilles and made love like Paris…?”

“Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.”

“It hurts when you lose a friend to death, it hurts even more when you lose a friend still living.”

“She buried her face in his shoulder. And while the truth still scared her, being in his arms made her feel like the sea finding its shore, like a traveler returning after a long, hard, distant trip-- finally returning home.”

“Ranger clicked his penlight on. "Hang onto me if you can't see." I curled my hand into the back of his cargo pants just above his gun belt. "I'm good to go."He was still for a beat. "You could have held on to my jacket," he said. "Would you rather I do that?""No. Not even a little.”