“Weeping is not the same thing as crying. It takes your whole body to weep, and when it's over, you feel like you don't have any bones left to hold you up.”

“I really don't even know you, and yet, in my life, you are forever entangled; to my history, inextricably bound.”

“Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's to much ...”

“Nothing ever really goes away--it just changes into something else. Something beautiful.”

“Anna," he said, dragging his frosted fingers through my hair."Don't you know what it means when a boy pulls your hair at your birthday party?" "No." Just, then, i didn't know what anything meant.”

“It was just over a year ago. Twelve months, nine days and six hours ago, actually. But thirteen months ago everything was...perfect.”

“I follow the path weve taken so many times this summer across the front, down the street, cut back through a neighbors yard, down the stairs to the beach, past the pier, through the campfire labyr...”

“So just over a year ago, there was this guy. I really liked him. I mean really since I was a kid. Did Frankie know him? The three of us were best friends. We basically grew up together. Complicate...”

“And in this moment of pale dawn in the hours before we leave California, I finally realize what has been the hardest thing for me about Matts death. It isnt that I lost a brother, like Frankie, or ...”

“I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.”

“This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appe...”

“Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars abov...”

“I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I hadn ever before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and f...”

“An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation...”

“Chiron looked surprised. I thought that would be obvious enough. The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.”