Quotes from Ann Napolitano

He's been sucker-punched by memories of his brother. This happens sometimes, and he knows he has to ride the memories out.

The fact that he had failed meant he had to continue to walk forward with his life history—his mistakes—slung over his shoulders like a heavy backpack. This fact exhausted him, but he was too tired to reject it.

We contain the other, hopelessly and forever." —James Baldwin

Edward spends every night reaching for unconsciousness as if it were a rock in the middle of a river, while a fierce current pulls him away. His fingertips sometimes

People fly despite knowing that a certain percentage of airplanes crash every year.

She's one of those people who live way too much in their heads and are too invested in their careful plans.

She fits her hand over his and presses. Her skin is soft, and the pressure makes his mouth form a smile. He can be furious with her and still be aware that he loves her at the same time. It took years for him to be able to accept the absence of logic in their love. Frustration plus a bad mood plus a particular smile of hers equaled a shot of joy in his belly.

He watches his new life walk into his old life.

deliberate about how they lived, wouldn't tolerate assholes, and always had each other's back. "How can I help?

Linda's uptight too, but in a disheveled way. Her wires are crossed and split and her energy flow is a mess.

Boom chicka boom. Benjamin can hear her soundtrack so clearly she might as well be carrying a speaker on each hip. In his neighborhood, she'd have a line of men following her down the street, dancing to that beat.

Each letter feels like a page in a book that he won't fully understand until he reaches the end. It feels imperative - in a way nothing else in his life has - that he read every word. The attention he brings to the letters seems to be changing him; Edward can feel strands inside himself gathering, trying to find a shape in which he will be able to meet the eyes of the people in the photographs.

He wonders if the scientists who tend to the Large Hadron Collider are hoping to discover not only what happens in the air between two people but how that pressurized air changes those people inside their skin. He hears the science teacher say, The air between us is not empty space.

She had screwed up, not him. It made her sad that her vast experience, even her marathon dances with men, hadn't left her any the wiser.

But I want you to understand that there can't be information about you—that is true—that you don't already know. Your life takes place in your skin. No one else knows a goddamn thing,

Then he bites an O in half and wills himself to remember nothing, think nothing, until all that exists is a flatness - a flatness he now identifies as himself.

John gestures with his hand again, this time seeming to refer to everything: the photographs, the letters, middle age, marriage. "If you live long enough, everything is complicated

We thought the boy might want this.

You have to earn sleep,

the stack of her seven favorite novels that she's been curating since childhood,

The physical jolt shifts something inside Jordan, and a new truth yawns open: I do need them. I need all three of them. And while the plane hesitates, as if deciding its next move, his apartment now has a bunk bed to share with his brother and another bedroom, for his parents.

Edward swallows. Like a dutiful student, he follows her train of thought. Voldemort equals plane crash. Dead parents equal dead parents. Harry equals him.

I'm either becoming Zen or more depressed, he thinks.

Some cover themselves with a jacket or blanket; like turtles, they withdraw into their shells.