And being here like this, so suddenly close to him is enough to make her lightheaded. It's a feeling like falling.

— Jennifer E. Smith

...and it struck her as the truest form of kindness, the most basic sort of love: to be worried about the one who was worrying about you.

— Jennifer E. Smith

And the boy's eyes are searching hers with something like loneliness, like the very last thing he wants is to be left behind right now.

— Jennifer E. Smith

And the geography of the thing--the geography of them--was completely and hopelessly wrong.

— Jennifer E. Smith

As if it were far easier to start over completely than to try to put everything back together again.

— Jennifer E. Smith

Because even this --being so close to her --was no longer the same. That light he'd felt when he first saw her --he understood now that it was only a lightbulb. It was quick and easy, full of electricity, but there was something artificial about it. What he wanted was fire: heat and spark and flame.

— Jennifer E. Smith

Beside her, she can feel each breath he draws. How is it possible to be so close to a person and still not know what you are to each other? With baseball, it's simple. There's no mystery to what happens on the field because everything has a label -- full count, earned run, perfect game -- and there's a certain amount of comfort in this terminology. There's no room for confusion and Ryan wishes now that everything could be so straightforward. But then Nick pulls her closer, and she rests her head on his chest, and nothing seems more important than this right here.

— Jennifer E. Smith

But a small part of him also knew that the reason he'd never ventured anywhere was because of the worry that the reality of the world wouldn't match up to his dreams.

— Jennifer E. Smith

But it was different, somehow, to be reading it here, where the actual events had taken place all those hundreds of thousands of years ago. That was the thing about books, she was realizing; they could take you somewhere else entirely, it was true. But it wasn't the same thing as actually going there yourself.

— Jennifer E. Smith

But she knew it would never happen. She had no intention of visiting him there. Even if she were open to the idea, as Mom and Dad both hoped she would be, the mathematics of it seemed utterly impossible to her. What was she supposed to do, spend Christmas there and Easter here? See her dad every other holiday and one week during the summer, just enough to glimpse his new life in fragments, tiny slivers of a world she had no part in? And all the while missing out on those moments of her mom’s life—her mom, who’d done nothing to deserve to spend Christmas alone? That, it seemed to Hadley, was no way to live. Perhaps if there were more time, or if time were more malleable; if she could be both places at once, live parallel lives; or, simpler yet, if Dad would just come home. Because as far as she was concerned, there was no in-between: She wanted all or nothing, illogically, irrationally, even though something inside of her knew that nothing would be too hard, and all was impossible.

— Jennifer E. Smith