“First think of the person who lives in disguise,Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies.Next, tell me what's always the last thing to mend,The middle of middle and the end of end?And finally give me the sound often heardDuring the search for a hard-to-find word.Now string them together, and answer me this,Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?”

“Fine, tell them who you think you are. Fine, tell them fine is what you are. And when you finally figure out what it is you need, you better think of me.”

“If you feel like you have to have them for some reason, tell me and we'll take them out together. Promise?""If you promise not to tell the whole school about this.""I won't tell them anything. Deal?""Deal.""I think we should seal it."I gave a jittery laugh. "With a handshake?""I was thinking more like a kiss.”

“Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.”

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”

“Telling a story ain’t hard,” Lettie had said. “All you need is a beginning, middle, and end.”But that was the problem. I was all middle. I’d always been between the last place and the next. How was I supposed to come up with a story for Sister Redempta or even a “Remember when…” to reminisce on with somebody else?”