Katherine Hannigan · 272 pages
Rating: (21.4K votes)
“...if a child waited to speak until all the grown-ups settled down and gave her some room to say her piece, the most important things would never get said.”
“I closed my eyes, put my right hand on top of the book, and passed it lightly across the cover. It was cool and smooth like a stone from the bottom of the brook, and it stilled me. A whole other world is inside there, I thought to myself, and that's where I want to be.”
“...when your heart changes, you change, and you have to make new plans.”
“...how do you run and play when you feel like there are bricks of the heaviest sadness weighing down every part of your body? How do you laugh and talk when there are no laughs left inside of you?”
“There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too.”
“In the morning I'm like a snake in the spring: I need to lie out on a warm rock and let the sun sink into me before I can start wiggling around and get on with the day.”
“I was saying the right things, but not the really true things.”
“I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.”
“It thought about the magic that happens when you tell a story right, and everybody who hears it not only loves the story, but they love you a little bit, too, for telling it so well. Like I love Ms. Washington, in spite of myself, the first time I heard her. When you hear somebody read a story well, you can't help but think there's some good inside them, even if you don't know them.”
“We don't own the earth. We are the earth's caretakers...we take care of it and all the things on it. And when we're done with it, it should be left better than we found it.”
“I believe good plans are the best way to maximize fun, avoid disaster, and possibly, save the world. I spend a lot of my time making them.”
“I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and filled myself up with the breeze from the valley. Then I let it out slow so it could get back to its travels, with a little bit of me added to it.”
“...all of a sudden I felt filled up again, so that my heart might come up my throat. And I was thinking how that can come over you, out of nowhere, and if it wasn't such a fine feeling, it might almost be frightening. Like there's more love and good thoughts and powerful things inside of you than one body can hold.”
“...sadness is a powerful foe, maybe harder to keep down than happiness...”
“I know it's hard to not do well at something, and I know it's hard to need help.”
“There is never enough time for fun.”
“Then I looked right at Mama, for the first time in what seemed like forever, and she wasn't looking at me, but into me. She was pulling me to her with her eyes, like she used to do. All of a sudden I could see the light that was Mama's shining out of her eyes. I couldn't help smiling at it.
'Be careful,' my heart warned me.
But I was having a hard time remembering that there as anything to be careful about. Because if I just looked at Mama's eyes...I could tell that the part of her I thought had gone away forever was still there and glowing, only from deep down inside her.”
“When she'd read, her voice wrapped around my head and my heart, and it softened and lightened everything up. It put a pain in my hear that felt good.”
“He’s happy, Yi-yi.”
I went very still. “He, who?”
“The one who danced you into love.”
“birdwatching or sailing. Dad often took me out on his small catamaran, which only increased my love of the water, and I finally learned to swim. Just being able to look out at the horizon gave me peace of”
“That thing that everyone talks about. That really big newspaper in the sky that came along and ruined everything else, blah blah blah.'
Rosie was stumped, until light finally dawned. 'You mean the internet?'
'Well, yes. I hate that thing.'
'The whole thing?'
'Yes.'
'You hate the entire internet?'
'Yes.”
“Perfect! You guys are the same age. I bet you have a lot in common.”
Classic adult logic. Reid and I are vaguely the same age, so of course we’re basically soul mates. It’s like horoscopes. Somehow I’m supposed to believe that I’m similar in some meaningful way to every single person born on my birthday. Or every single Sagittarius. I mean, I barely have anything in common with Cassie, and we were born six minutes apart.”
“What makes us the most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not normal.”
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