“Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska...But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote”

“How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.”

“My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.”

“...but most houses in California were built without roots, leaving us trapped above ground with the light.”

“So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?”

“Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long ago written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day.”

“Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.”