“I'll just hang upside down from the wire banana and throw bags of flour at the librarians.”

“It's easy to get caught up in how our figures look when we stand naked in front of the mirror. But we must remember that we are more than how we look. We are not boobs who happen to have hearts, minds, and souls; rather, we are souls that just happen to have mounds of flesh protruding from our chests.”

“It's just the beginning”

“Carly stopped at the base of the flags. One more foot forward and she would leave Alaska for the first time, and likely never see it again. She looked back over her shoulder for a long moment, and was hit by the fleeting temptation to turn around and coast back down the mountain to Skagway. But she turned to face forward, to face the future, full of unknown perils and uncertainties. It was a long and winding road to an unknown destination, a road that would take courage to face. And she found she had that courage, the same courage her history teacher had said drove the gold miners onward when there was just a narrow trail through these mountains.”

“No one ever complained about a fat brain. No one ever accused their brain of being too short or too tall, too wide or too narrow. Or ugly. It either worked or it didn't, and mine worked just fine.”

“He had the face of a floating astronaut who had lost his tether and had only one chance to grab a lifeline or forever drift away into endless black. I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world.”

“What do you mean, is that it? I just saved his career and the CIA from ruin and he calls me a perfidious ass.""What's perfidious mean?" Ace asked from the driver's seat."You deceived him and stole his girlfriend out from under his nose," Julia said to Conrad. "I think technically 'ass' is a pretty mild revilement.""Revilement?" Ace looked at one and then the other in his rearview. "This is some kind of spy talk, isn't it? Okay, I'm down with it. Just tell me what it means.”