“They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.”

“Maybe she'd always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them. ”

“...he wanted to be all poetic, but in an instant he forgot Joe's poem about Japan except the part about 'you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,' and a new sound entered his life...”

“Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.”

“My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die.I counted.It happened on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I’d ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-La. We were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because I wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, 'What’s the difference between a trip and a journey?' and my father said, 'Narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand,' and that was the last thing he ever said.”

“Who do you hang out with?" Natalia asks, looking over my shoulder. She's always done that. Wherever you are, whoever you are, she'll always look over your shoulder to see if there's someone more exciting to speak to. It used to make me feel paranoid.”

“I have one brother and I live with four hundred guys. Girls under the age of fourteen are the most frightening creatures I have ever come across.”