“Bob exploded. 'There is no such thing as a casual conversation with my mother. Every single word will be twisted recognition until before you know it you're playing Russian roulette in a wind tunnel with a psychotic dwarf, having wagered your birthright for a piece of cheese...”

“And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond.And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.”

“For those poor souls who can only think of the terrible fear and danger of a runaway horse, think of this: a speed like water flowing over stone, a skimming sensation that hovers and dips while the world spins around and the wind drags your skin taut across your bones. You can close your eyes and lose yourself in the rhythm, because nothing you do or shout or wish for will happen until the running makes up its mind to stop. So you hold steady, balancing yourself in the wake, and unhook your mind from the everyday while you sit at the silent center of it all and hope that the feeling won't stop till you're good and ready for life to be ordinary once more.”

“I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening.”

“I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.”

“It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second.”

“Bob's talent, such as it is, consists entirely of the few unconscious charms of youth: its energy, audacity and complete inability to recognize its own shortcomings.”