“If only [there] really was a door and [you] could walk through it into another life, where threads didn't snarl and stitches didn't go all tight and tiny. Where people loved you and didn't leave you for someone else.”

“You could love many people in your life. Maybe love didn't die even when a person did, but that didn't mean there might not be room for someone else in your heart.”

“Really to see where you've come from, you have to go someplace else. Otherwise you wouldn't understand that the world didn't finish at the end of your street.”

“But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn't.”

“Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.”

“There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?”