“Beauty didn't seem to be a priority for people anymore. If you had to judge by I-95, America had become a cancerous clusters of cheap houses, replicating out of control...People just needed places to collect their stuff.”

“A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

“• People deserve a break. The stressed and unorganized person who doesn’t have the same priorities as you may be dealing with an autistic child, abusive spouse, fading parents, or cancer. Don’t judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Give them a break instead.”

“He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.”

“Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.”

“What they had was rare, imperfect and beautiful and scary all at once. It was hard to say those things out loud and know the right words to use. But that was okay. Because when two people found each other, two people who were meant to be, words didn't even matter anymore. They just knew. And that was the luckiest thing of all.”