They had sometimes experienced this with adults – surprise that information that they had made available to be viewed by anybody at any time had, in fact, been viewed by somebody. (Location 371)

We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not. (Location 455)

Writing a poem does the opposite, she said. If you look at the world, a little piece of the world, and try to see it for what it actually is, you start to see yourself more clearly too. And that can be very liberating. Sometimes it can save your life. (Location 457)

One time she asked him, joking but not really, if he cared about her at all, and he shot right back, as if he’d been waiting for the question, I only care about dead rappers. (Location 895)

Sometimes after he’d drunk a couple of beers, he’d come out with crazy ideas. For instance: if a dog’s sense of smell was fifty thousand times more powerful than a human’s, that meant that instead of humans’ binary perception of There/Gone, dogs must have a spectrum of thereness. Like, say you’re here, then you go out. To me, you’re gone. But to a dog you’re still mostly here, because your smell lingers much longer, and that’s their strongest sense. So they must have a whole different understanding of time, because for them the past is literally still around. When a dog looks at the world, it must see all of these presences gradually fading out. Like a sky full of jet contrails. (Location 905)

You expect a flood to be clean, to wash everything away, but it was the opposite. (Location 1027)

Instead of yelling at you when you did something wrong, like her mother did, Dad liked to bring you on a little journey first, up over the hills and mountains. It made it hard to fight back; you just had to follow the path he had laid out, his voice calm and even, your guilt crushing down on your shoulders, until turning a corner you would find yourself at the summit, your crime lying spread out in a panorama before you, and you and he would gaze down on it together. (Location 1094)

It was one of those nights when nothing fits together. You meet the wrong people, you say the wrong things; no matter how much you drink, you can’t relax. The best thing would be to call it quits and go home, but of course you never do. (Location 1141)

That is the mercy of this part of the world The roads have that many twists and turns You never have to go far to disappear (Location 5280)

All these trees have found it, Victor said. He pointed up at the huge sycamores surrounding them. They’ve dug their roots down till they’ve found the aquifer. For people it’s no different. If they have roots in the land, they can communicate with it. The land wants you to survive. (Location 5639)