“And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?”

“And that's like my world." Annie pointed up to the stars again."Inaccecible.”

“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”

“The 1st day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to do that forever.”

“And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that live under the ...”

“Theres a Greek legendno, its in something Plato wroteabout how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they ...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”