“Clare concentrated on the words trying hard to press them into her memory and wishing they were solid objects that she could keep and carry around with her.”

“Clare wasn't worried anymore about their being mean to each other. She imagined that someday she'd be part of a friendship in which she and the friend thought so highly of each other and were so sure of this that they could say anything.”

“He wasn’t looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. “It was like reading,” she would try to explain later, and she wasn’t talking about phonics. She didn’t break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn’t sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.”

“The sight made her ache. How can I not touch you? she thought hopelessly, and then she was doing it, her fingers on his wrist. He didn't jump or even look at her, just stopped writing. Neither one of them moved, nothing moved, and the whole thing lasted three or four seconds at most, but when Pen took her hand away and started to breathe again, her chest hurt, as though she had been holding her breath for a very long time.”

“Its hard to say what was happening inside her head. Her brain doesn't function quite like most people's to begin with and maybe, under a lot of stress, she just lost the ability to hope.Dev pondered this, hope as an ability.I guess that's what's so hard for me to get to, the no hope. To think that, of all the potential scenarios out there, there's not a single good one? It just seems like we- as human beings- know so much, but its nothing compared to what we don't know. The universe surprises us, right? That's just what it does. So how could she be so one hundred percent positive that nothing good would happen?”

“When he looked up, he said, "Clare told me about Christmas." And I swear the boy's face began to shine. I recognized what I saw there: that a person's name could be infinitely precious, that just saying it could make you feel singled out for glory.”

“But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.”