“Shed passed the fear barrier, and shed lived, and shed discovered not certain death, as shed imagined, but impossible splendor. What other beautiful things had fear been hiding from her? What else ...”

“The old fear was there, the grapnel anchor lodged in her chest, the thing that wanted to pull her back away from the edge and whisper no, no, no. Yet there was a new thing: a lure. Something down i...”

“As she fell, Esther wasnt worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasnt worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her...”

“Esther supposed, as they held each other under a threadbare carpet of stars, that this was how it must always feel in the beginning. Yet even there, next to him, the most excellent person in the un...”

“Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldnt be saved, Esthers heart broke a little more.”

“How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”

“Scenery is fine -but human nature is finer”

“As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice fo...”

“Nature allows one kind to kill another, it's part of the law ... you wonder if man might not be the most savage of all creatures. He's among the few that preys on nearly every other being, that con...”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”