Change is the nature of nature,'" she read. "'For example, stars expand as they grow older. They grow from a star, to a red super-giant, to a supernova. When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion dispenses different elements-helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel-across the universe, scattering stardust. That stardust now makes up the planets, including ours.

— Michelle Cuevas

Cloud root beer floats and moon grilled cheeses. But their favorite food is stardust.

— Michelle Cuevas

Found in trees. Sometimes also in old silent movie theaters, seaside zoos, magic shops, hat shops, time-travel shops, topiary gardens, cowboy boots, castle turrets, comet museums, dog pounds, mermaid ponds, dragon lairs, library stacks (the ones in the back), piles of leaves, piles of pancakes, the belly of a fiddle, the bell of a flower, or in the company of wild herds of typewriters. But mostly in trees.

— Michelle Cuevas

He saw the kind of beauty yellow flowers have growing over a carpet of dead leaves. The beauty of cracks forming a mosaic in a dry riverbed, of emerald-green algae at the base of a seawall, of a broken shard from a blue bottle. The beauty of a window smudged with tiny prints. The beauty of wild weeds.

— Michelle Cuevas

It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! Furthermore, it's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. Furthermore, it's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. Furthermore, it's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!

— Michelle Cuevas

Jacques wants a pancake shaped like Mozart's Symphony No. 40! In G minor!

— Michelle Cuevas

Sometimes imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones.

— Michelle Cuevas

The fort. Where the pair stored their painted scenes and books of made-up languages, their two-man band, and the tiny matchbox bed plus accessories that they made in case, someday, their experiments in the world of shrinking finally panned out.

— Michelle Cuevas

The missions were always changing-sometimes collecting jars of rain, paper bags of hiccups, adopting lost moonbeams and folding them into cake batter. Or perhaps investigating glittering slug trails left in the moonlight, finding the owners of abandoned buttons, or playing the sousaphone for caterpillars still in their cocoons.

— Michelle Cuevas

They are forever looking into the nooks and crannies of a thing, whatever the thing may be. Always up very early or very late, going for rides on the backs of whales who deliver the mail; waking up covered in a secret language of hums; writing about the hobbies of feathers; changing shape like a cloud; howling at the moon; being a radioactive night-light in the dark; being a life raft on an ocean of alphabet soup; being great-hearted; being selfless; believing in tall tales, doodlebugs, and doohickeys. Believing. Believing in themselves. Believing in you.

— Michelle Cuevas