In the middle of all this, as Sean slips out of his jacket, he looks over his shoulder at me and he smiles at me, just a glancing, faint thing before he turns back to Tommy. I'm quite happy for that smile, because Dad told me once you should be grateful for the gifts that are the rarest.

When Dove moves up from a canter to a gallop, sometimes the only way I can tell the difference is because her hooves pound a four-time rhythm instead of a three. But when Corr moves into a gallop, it's as if it's a gait that's just been invented, something so much faster than all the others that it should be called something else...Each stride feels like it takes us a mile. We'll run out of island before he runs out of speed. We're giants, on his back.

Grace,” I said, very softly. “Say something.” Sam,” she said, and I crushed her to me.

I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself.

He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.

Mutual, respectful, enduring love is completely attainable as long as you swear you won't settle for less.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by what an incredible person this boy was, standing in front of me, and by the fact that he was mine and I was his. "Right now," Sam said - and I saw that he held the invoice for today's studio time in his hand, folded into a bird with sun-washed wings - "it's hard to imagine that it is raining anewhere in the world." "From Linger, page 258