“He had to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have.”

“Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once he had believed he was smart and might become something - not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.”

“There must be a language that doesn’t depend on words, the boy thought… He was learning lots of new things. Some of them were things that he had already experienced, and weren’t really new, but that he had never perceived before. And he hadn’t perceived them because he had become accustomed to them…”

“He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn't know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.”

“He realized with a start that something was about to begin. It might be something dull and uninspiring, something he had experienced countless times before, something that wouldn't make a lick of difference when he died. But it was always good to have something about to begin.”

“...to say it out loud is to give shape to something he had wanted to remain formless.”