“Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.”

“Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.”

“You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.”

“Evangeline's obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery.”

“Though she'd try to do otherwise, she had never been able to stop cluttering her present with her past. Now somebody she didn't know would pack her treasures into plastic bags and carry them away. A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken - are allowed to stay behind.”

“I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.”

“How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”