The desert adapts. The people adapt. Live. Die. Struggle. Suffer. Create. The people in the real world beyond Demesne's ring are not all manufactured perfection. They deal.

It broke the spell. It's not that I stopped being happy. I was still inexplicably, utterly happy. But suddenly the happiness had implications.

It's over when you decide it's over," Norah says. "When you call it a night. The rest is just a matter of where the sun is in the sky. That has nothing to do with us.

One of the failures of cellular communication is that tiredness often comes across as sadness.

The reward is in the risk. You can’t stay hidden inside Grandpa’s overprotective cloak forever. You’ve seemed like you needed to grow out of that for a while. Mom and Dad going away, and the red notebook, these things just helped. Now it’s up to you to

The only use she has for the word fun is to make the word funeral.

I thought about the bigger picture of my life, and about the people—and particularly the guys—I would encounter during my lifetime. How would I ever know when that moment was right, when expectation met anticipation and formed … connection?