“Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.”

“So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.”

“Paul, careening down the slide with his arms out flung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence.”

“Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.”

“A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.”

“The interwoven spheres and vines ran along the bottom. I'd done some research, and I'd found this motif everywhere. These overlapping circles were ancient, tracing back to Pythagorean geometry--geometry, a measure of the world. In more mystical terms, the shape had always evoked tghe place where world overlap: dreaming with waking, death with life, the visible with the unseen. [p. 362]”

“She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life.”