"Every once in awhile, a person's lucky enough to make an unforgettable friend; you're it, for me."

"People don't vanish into thin air; when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere."

"I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. - Vladimir Nabokov"

"There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you. But this feels too real. This feels like it has actually happened."

"I knew her well enough to understand that when she pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first."

"You could have been Bethany Matthews, Delia Hopkins, Cleopatra-it wouldn't matter. And if you'd grown up with a thousand lemon trees in the middle of the desert . . . well, then, I would have a cactus instead of a Christmas tree and a pet armadillo. i would have defended illegal aliens crossing the border. But we would still would have wound up together, Dee. No matter what kind of life I had, you'd be at the end of it."

"I don't know who I am. All I know is that I'm not the person i was yesterday. I don't know if I've got a mother somewhere. I don't know if I was being hurt in some way I don't even want to think about."

"No one ever looks twice at someone who acts like he has nothing to hide."

"There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found."

"When people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness."

"History is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you will always know what's hidden underneath."

"When you love someone, you want them to have everything they want."

"You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it wont be what you imagine-you will easily toss aside unfinished work, bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April, because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out what is important is not everything that you've accumulated over all these years, but those few things you can carry with you."

"It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it."

"Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth."

"We say it all the time-how we'd give up anything for someone we love-but I wonder, when push comes to shove, who'd truly step up to the line?"

"I don't know why its called 'getting lost'. Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turns to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be."

"You think you know the world you are living in.. If you can feel it, and touch it, and smell it, and taste it, then it must be so. You tell yourself that you would bet your life on the simple fact that the sky is blue. And then one day someone comes along and informs you emphatically that you're wrong. Blue, you insist. Blue as the ocean. Blue as a whale. Blue as my daughters eyes. But that person shakes his head, and everyone else backs him up. You poor girl, they say. All of those things-the ocean, the whale, her eyes-they're green. You've gotten them mixed up. You've had it wrong all along."

"Right now I don't feel much of anything. As if I have developed the thick, scaly skin that this desert environment requires. As if you could prick me with a needle, a knife, a spear, and my body would not remember how to bleed. "

"I close my eyes and think of all the people I have been in my lifetime: a boy who fell in love with a broken girl a thousand years ago; a father holding a newborn thinking that nothing could ever make him let her go; a man starving for one more moment with his little girl; a fugitive on the run; a liar; a cheat; a felon."