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.

If I hadn't learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We'd seen what we'd come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upwards, black and blue into the even bluer sky.

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

Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head