“A consensus slowly gathered among us. We had given up something important, we believed: the fire, the vigor, that came with a lack of ease. We had lost some of the difficulty of our lives, and we wanted it back.”

“The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.”

“...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.”

“She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.”

“Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.”

“Sometimes I remember the way I used to be," she said as we sat across the table from each other, "and I'm surprised nobody ever smacked me." I took a long sip of my coffee so that I would not have to answer her. I wanted to tell her that she ought to be more generous to the girl she used to be, if not out of respect for herself, then out of respect for me, or more specifically for the boy I used to be, who loved that girl, after all.”

“The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail points. In Andrew Brady’s yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film strip in Miss Applebome’s class, and the lights were out, and you sat behind me scratching my back with your fingers.”