In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

The zipper opened all the way down our spines.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.