“Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.”

“Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.”

“There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you.”

“The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said.”

“He could be breaking apart inside and you'd never know it from the way he acted. He'd be just as pleasant and polite as if he didn't have a care in the world. You had to be careful with someone like that. You could never know what he was thinking.”

“Yeah whatever," Andrew said impatiently. "He came back to the room that night and kept talking about this girl he'd seen at the stargazing. He was shy, and so I told him if he pointed you out, I'd try to finagle a meeting." I swear, Andrew's the only person in the world who could use a word like finagle with a straight face. "But he was talking about me," I said. Andrew shrugged. "When we figured it out, we had a good laugh about it," he said defensively. "But of course you were my girlfriend. So that was that.”

“I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.”