Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.

And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.

I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I'm breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed in my life.

The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.

If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else.

Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.