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1 " He smiled the kind of smile that is the reason for wars and poetry. "
― Marisa de los Santos , The Precious One
2 " I know a lot of people do jobs their whole lives that they don't find fascinating. Wonder is a luxury. But I wanted it. "
3 " It’s just that without wanting to or trying to—and for years I was deliberately trying not to—I held on to love. Or it held on to me. Not active love; not love, the verb form. It was more just there, a small, unshakable thing, leftover, useless, as vestigial as wisdom teeth or a tailbone, but still potent enough so that when I heard his voice on the phone, my heart gave a tiny jump of hope that made me want to slap it. "
4 " IT STARTED THE WAY a lot of things in tenth grade started, with Itzy Wolcraft shrieking across the cafeteria. "
5 " If you never share the worst thing you’ve ever done with a single person, if you just carry it all by yourself, maybe it comes between you and everyone you meet, even if it’s years later. "
6 " When you say those wedding vows at eighteen, you are committing yourselves—with all that you are and all that you have—to only each other because you are young and wreathed in glory and take up all the space there is. When you say them at thirty-five, you are signing on for something wider: a whole garden full of people to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, in wheelchairs and sleepwalking and heart attacks, in arrogance and graciousness, stubbornness and forgiveness, stumbling and wisdom, in meanness and in kindness that falls like snow and shines brighter than the Dog Star. "
7 " since she and Marcus and her mother left, she’s been close to obsessed with wanting "
8 " No one is truly interesting until he is in graduate school,” pronounced Wilson. "
9 " Never, ever lie, unless it’s to spare someone’s feelings or to weasel out of something you really don’t want to do, but only if not doing that something will not result in bodily or even psychic harm to another human being, unless that human being is exceptionally mean in which case minor psychic harm is permissible”—my "
10 " I laughed. I cried. Sometimes, hours or days after I’d last seen Trillium, some tiny, jewel-colored piece of story would come winging toward me out of the blue, and I would laugh or cry again. "
