“Let whoever opens a door make certain there are no enemies hiding behind it.”

“If a man's kiss burns like fire, his love will be true, but if his kiss burns like ice...his love will bring pain and ruin.”

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

“Nomi, he said, you just need to wake up to the fact that other people need to know where you're going. But there's nobody behind me, I told him. And he said, reassuringly, that someday there may be.”

“When I opened up the bottle of wine, Thebes said whoa, you yanked that cork out of there like you were saving it from drowning. She got out her markers and drew a screaming face on the cork.”

“Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.”

“Having a plan softened by spine into the mattress, quelled the rising simmer within me, setting me right in the same way that reading the first question of a dreaded exam or the first page of a new book set me right, those moments when wide-open uncertainty was, if not resolved, at least whittled into something more tangible and concrete.”