She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn’t imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn’t really imagine it hadn’t.

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things

Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.

Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.

Carmen sat up when she heard a familiar trill from her computer. It was an instant message from Bee. Beezy3: Packing. Do you have my purple sock with the heart on the ankle? Carmabelle: No. Like I'd wear your socks. Carmen looked from her computer screen down to her feet. To her dismay, her socks were two faintly different shades of purple. She rotated her foot to get a view of her anklebone. Carmabelle: Ahem. Might possibly have sock.

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

For some reason our lives were marked by summers. . . . Summer was the time when our lives joined completely, when we all had our birthdays, when really important things happened