“Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.”

“Everything, in the end, comes down to timing. One second, one minute, one hour could make all the difference.”

“That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about.”

“Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.”

“It seemed like this day could go in so many directions, like a spiderweb shooting out toward endless possibilities. Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.”

“We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever.That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.”

“Here was a boy who liked flaws, who saw them not as failings but as strengths. Who knew such a person could exist, or what would have happened if we'd found each other under different circumstances? Maybe in a perfect world. But not in this one.”