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?

These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

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.

I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

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