How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.

Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.

And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose tot ell it, even to one person at a time.

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.