“Drop onto all fours and crawl the length of the court or field, as if you were climbing a wall. This prepares you, too, for light cat burgling, should your athletic career flag.”

“There was no girls' cross-country team at our high school, since cross-country courses were two or three miles long, and, at that distance, a girl's uterus could fall out.”

“Every hour of television that a person watches after the age of twenty-five, the researchers concluded, potentially snips twenty-two minutes off of the viewer's life span.”

“Sometimes something comes along and tears your roots right out the ground, and that’s when you know you been planted too long.”

“Why aren't you at school?" I ask suddenly. "It's a holiday," he says, a little too quickly."Right. What holiday would that be? National Talk Out of Your Ass Day?”

“I felt the way I feel sometimes right before you go to sleep, when all you want to do is sleep, and then suddenly, when you're almost there, when your mind goes dizzy and it's almost like you don't have a body at all, your remember how long the night is, how you might not wake back up. And like a shock, you're sitting straight up, scared to do the thing you've done every day of your life.”

“Don't you see? We were meant to save each other.”