“...a summer romance that showed her stability and love could walk hand in hand. That love wasn't really what she'd been taught by her own family. It wasn't supposed to be a Tasmanian devil of insecurity and obsession. "Life gets heavy,"she told us, "like hot summer nights. At first you toss and turn, but slowly you learn that if you keep very, very still your body can capture a random breeze that latches onto you and cools you for a moment. Infinite and blissful, your body soars to greet it and holds onto it, but it leaves. And that's love. That's what love does".”

“Here's a secret to love," she said. "Always make sure that the man loves you just a breath more than you love him.""Oh Mimi, I love your Papa more than any woman ever loved any man. And still, he loves me a breath more. It's the only healthy way. If a woman loves too much- if her love is heavier- she won't see anything but him. She'll be blind to the world. Women are made like that. We have to teach ourselves not to become obsessed. True love lies in peace, not torture.”

“Do you love her?' she asked him.'Always have,' he said.'Then why in the world would you leave her alone?”

“What did you say to me Itsy? The day when you broke your silence?"Itsy shrugged and shuffled back into her own apartment.”

“Magic is a funny term,' she'd say. 'There is nothing supernatural about the earth. As long as you know what does what.”

“A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It's scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you're going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you're the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.”

“She remembered reading somewhere that Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. Eleanor wished there were a hundred ways to say her name. She thought, maybe, if her name was howled from all corners of the world, in a million different voices, that she might explode into a cloud of snow. Light and separate, her parts floating down onto the world in a series of beautiful crystalline moments.”