“In kindegarten, he had learned how to make a bruise stop hurting: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. the first times it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little l...”

“All their lives Nath had understood, better than anyone, the lexicon of their family, the things they could never truly explain to outsiders: that a book or a dress meant more than something to rea...”

“When a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he sens...”

“Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths...”

“By tomorrow Marilyn would forget this moment: Lydia's shout, the shattered edges in her tone. It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth...”

“He can guess, but he won't ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she'd never told him.”

“Having friends was weird . . . but in a good way.”

“I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.”

“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been love...”

“When you find your path in life and are in sync with your primary missions in this lifetime, everything else just falls into place.”

“Discovering and fulfilling your personal destiny is lifes ultimate challenge and its greatest reward.”

“I told you. You don't love someone because of their looks or their clothes or their car. You love them because they sing a song only your heart can understand.”

“So many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it.”

“I loved him.I couldn't pinpoint what made me so certain, but I knew it then, as surely as I knew my name or the color of the sky or any fact written in a book.Could he feel it, too?Maxon broke the ...”

“The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.”