“No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time.”

“Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys--maybe you just have to be angry all the time.”

“Are you a girl or a boy?' Liesl was wearing the same thin nightshirt she had been wearing since Tuesday, when her father died, and it occurred to her that if the ghost was a boy, she should cover up. 'Neither,' the ghost replied.Liesel was startled. 'You have to be one or the other.''I don't have to be anything,' the ghost replied, sounding irritated. 'I am what I am and that's all. Things are different on the Other Side, you know. Things are... blurrier.”

“Segregation has it all wrong. We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.”

“And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.”

“I'm not scared, if that's what you're wondering. The moment of death is full of sound and warmth and light shooting away, arcing up and up and up, and if singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing...The rest you have to find out for yourself.”

“It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.”