“You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.”

“Katie cleared her throat again. Then she looked into the window at her gums. She said, "To change the subject, do you think I could tell if I had gingivitis?”

“I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.”

“I looked over at her face. I could see the light from my heartbeat on her tears.”

“Lily told her about what had happened so far. (If you're interested, you can go back to the beginning of the book and read all the way through to this point again.)”

“I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could.I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America.I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”

“I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.”