Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?