Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

Time itself made all things rare.

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.