It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

She was supposed to be putting her life together right now, and all she could seem to do was throw grenades at it.

She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Got that? -Coach Brevin

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.

Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.

It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.