I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met.

The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.

She was up and down—from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?