Quotes from Ann Napolitano

restitch himself to life's fabric. Dr. Dembia had

love was the sea;

snowed in with secrets. Whenever she opened

can't bear to pretend happiness." Sylvie

he didn't understand, but as the clock hand labored from one minute to the next, he wished that he were gone too. Off the basketball court, he had no usefulness. No

sense the enormous beauty that lay on the far side of those walls.

pleasantly tickled.

This is why we live. She and William held

sweep her sister's husband into her own heart.

Her father had called Julia his rocket ever since she was a little girl—I can't wait to watch you fly, he'd say—and she was the one who fixed problems.

Julia specialized in answers. From the time she was old enough to speak, she'd bossed her sisters around, pointing out their problems and providing solutions. Sometimes her sisters found this irritating, but they would also admit that having a "master troubleshooter" in their

Sylvie was being punished for the choice she'd made twenty-five years earlier. Even

had to look the word up. The definition had delighted her, and she'd hoped the girl was correct. The four Padavano sisters dressed up as witches for Halloween that year, and Charlie gleefully quoted Macbeth at them. Julia, in the height of her girlhood, with a pointed black hat on her head, knew that they were a coven of witches,

Perhaps Sylvie's body had been ultimately unable to bear the distance between Chicago and New York.

She was all of herself with him and even felt there was room for her to become more. When he rested his eyes on her, it was without judgment or expectation, and in that space, Sylvie felt her potential: for bravery, brilliance, kindness, joy. All of these sails rested on the deck of her ship; they were hers, but she hadn't seen them before.

Sylvie had almost missed this life with this man, and because of this near-miss, she appreciated their moments together, even as they accumulated.

Since the diagnosis, Sylvie had returned to Leaves of Grass. She wanted to absorb Whitman's optimistic take on death; she wanted to share the poet's open mind about what came next. Whenever Sylvie felt a quiver of fear, she repeated to herself the line: And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

He never would have reached this point, the middle, without her.

You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history,

shadow represents either the blocking out of light or the other half of a person. When a character loses their shadow, they've lost a part of themselves and have to search to get it back.

We're all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.

Kent's affection for William was too clear and too uncomplicated. It shone on William like the sun. No one had ever loved him unconditionally like this, and that love, when he was the most undeserving he'd ever been in his life, made

To be the rocket, she had to be with her sisters, and she had to set her daughter free.

He had been her person, and they'd passed books back and forth between them her entire life.