“People keep talking about this unfolding. I can't trust the unfolding, okay? If there is some higher power making origami out of the universe, it hates my guts. I was a fat kid whose parents got divorced, whose father died, and then who got cancer herself. So no. I don't trust how things are going to unfold.”

“You can't force your will with the universe. You just have to trust how things unfold.”

“You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that.”

“Ah. Alicia, see? Didn't I tell you that's what she needed to begin with? Maybe a little schtupping and it would make the cancer go away. It works with pimples.''Nana!”

“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.”

“Infinity fascinated her. How systems and universes could keep getting infinitely smaller in one direction and infinitely larger in another. How the shape of an atom so precisely mimicked the shape of the solar system. How there wasn't an end to anything.”

“. . . Mind if I take the flamingo?""It's $2.89.""Whoa, Darren, you drive a hard bargain. How about I'm just going to take it?”