“Hours later, Adam propped himself up on an elbow and stared down at Gabrielle, pondering what made beauty.He thought he was beginning to understand. It wasn't symmetry of features; it wasn't perfection. It was uniqueness. That which one person had that no other possessed. That which was only their own.”

“The other day upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today; how I wish he'd go away!"~Gabrielle O'Callaghan towards Adam Black”

“But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself.”

“As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn't there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all.”

“It wasn't about how she looked, which was pretty, even though she was always wearing the wrong clothes and those beat-up sneakers. It wasn't about what she said in class--usually something no one else would've thought of, and if they had, something they wouldn't have dared to say. It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.”

“In fairy tales there's always one person who is made for one other, and they find each other and live happily ever after. Cal was my person. I couldn't imagine anyone more perfect. Yet what kind of sick fairy tale would it be if he was the one made exactly right for me and I wasn't right for him?”