“She would have to leave the country, or at least Nantucket, because there was no way she could live down the fact that she had tried to strangle the hottest boy on the island.”

“She would die feeling, because that was the way she had always lived.”

“When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with...”

“If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago, her father used to say, 'she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.”

“Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea.”

“ You would be forgiven for thinking Alex Morningside was a boy. In fact, she would be the first to laugh at this, because, for one thing, she wasn't, and for another, she had an Excellent Sense of Humour. It wasn't that she wanted to be a boy or anything, it was simply that she didn't see much difference in being treated as a girl or boy. Because, after all, everyone is just people. One of the reasons people thought she was a boy was her haircut. Her haircut looked like someone had put a bowl on her head and cut around it. Which is exactly what her uncle had done. Also, they thought she was a boy because her name was Alex. Of course, Alex was short for Alexandra, but neither Alex nor her uncle liked that very much, so they shortened the name. They could have shortened it the other was I suppose - Andra - but she and her uncle preferred Alex.”