“Some people, well, most people just seem to show up on your life with no clear purpose. Have you noticed that? They're like dust mites. You know they're there, you just don't know what to do about them.”

“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”

“Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them?...Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone?”

“There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.”

“All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues. But the important things that happen to you will happen to you even in the smallest places...”

“You can't replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but that's not to say you shouldn't get more dogs and people in your life.”

“You know what Sunday is, it's a day with a lot of potential for naps.”