Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.

He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon

As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life