“Sometimes it is good to have things happen to you outside of your control. There are parts of yourself you would never discover otherwise.”

“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...”

“Maybe we live in a universe where all you have control over is your own kindness.”

“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?”

“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.”

“When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of you. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.”

“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.”