I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.

We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.

Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.

When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you're with me always.

Just because something is unspoken doesn't mean that it disappears.

Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.