“Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?”

“It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.”

“This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.”

“I want to make a world more magical than my own. I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if it's ridiculed or if, rather than a neat round planet that goes around forever, it ends with a cliff that falls off into nothing. I want to have my eyes wide open, and I want to see this room and at the same time, not this room.”

“I shake my head, watching snow tumble and swirl from an all-white sky. The world seems so clean if you only look up”

“When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.”

“There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn't want us at all.”