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“This is, ultimately, a book about home. [...] I hope this book carries you somewhere magical. I hope it lets you feel ocean breezes in your hair and smell spilled beer on a karaoke bar’s floor. And then I hope it brings you back. That it brings you home, and fills you with ferocious gratitude for the people you love. Because, really, it’s less about the places we go than the people we meet along the way. But most of all, it’s about the ones who stay, who become home.”

“No part of me believes," I say, "that you struggle with first impressions." He brushes his thick hair up off his forehead, and it stays there, all except that one strand, of course, which is determined to fall sensually across his eyebrow. "Maybe you make me a little nervous." "Yeah, right," I say, spine tingling. "Just because you don't see me grabbing a mop every time you walk into a room doesn't mean I don't notice you're there." It feels like a bowling ball has landed in my stomach, a sudden drop. Then come the butterflies.”

“Finally,’ I said. ‘Something we agree on.’ ‘I bet we agree on a lot.’ He plucked a mangled maple-nut donut out and sat back, examining it in the fluorescent light. ‘Such as?’ ‘All the important stuff,’ Gus said. ‘The chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere, whether the world needs six Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that White Russians should only be drunk you’re already sure you’re going to vomit anyway.”

“I mean, It's a Wonderful Life was a box office flop in its time. If everyone who worked on that movie had known, could see how things were going to pan out in the short term, would they have even bothered to make it? And then the world would've lost out on something beautiful. Just because something doesn't make money or win awards doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Or doesn't deserve to exist. The job is alchemy. You take a hunk of rock and you try to turn it into gold, and the gold isn't even really the point." "Right, because the goal is immortality," I joke. "It's permanence," he says. "Not, like, having your name on the side of fucking airplane or skyscraper, or some shit like that. But bringing something intangible into the world that can live on without you. Something bigger than the person who made it. And even then, the goal is secondary to the process. The process is for us. It changes us in ways that can't be measured. At least, that's what I've always thought.”

“Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut-level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body. I’ve put so much time and distance between myself and that lonely girl, and what does it matter? Here is a piece of my past, right in front of me, miles away from home. You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong.”

“Do you get lonely?” I meant it in the most innocent way possible, but as soon as it sneaks out, I tingle with embarrassment. But he just studies me seriously, like it’s a perfectly normal thing to ask someone you very clearly want to sleep with. “Sometimes I . . .” He hesitates. “You can tell me,” I say, almost a whisper. His jaw muscles leap. “Sometimes I just miss this. Being close to someone. Being touched. Not just sex, I mean.”

“I think about that every time I’m in an airport,” I tell her. “It’s one reason I love traveling so much.” I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. “As a kid, I was a loner,” I explain, “and I always figured that when I grew up, I’d leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and—I don’t know. I don’t feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they’re all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.”

“The server comes up to take our order, bringing with her a wave of maple syrup, coffee, and pine—Bernie’s signature scent. If I could walk around smelling like this restaurant for all time, I would. I would also have to start wearing a fanny pack stuffed with blueberry pancakes, though, and that could make things awkward at the hospital. People get all up in arms if their surgeon has a partially zipped knapsack of food strung around their waist.”

“He could wait out any bad mood. The anger of an animal didn't make him angry. It helps you understand them better, he told me. You don't want that anger becoming fear. You want it turning into trust. And while there were a lot of things he'd hated about working at a ranch, he'd loved the feeling of coming to an agreement with another living thing, of understanding each other's needs, giving space when it was time for it, and pulling close when it was needed.”

“June, Moments are like cherries. They're meant to be relished, shared - not hoarded. You can clutch one terrible Moment or experience all the rest. Your life is slipping past in brilliant little bits, and I know it feels as though you're holding on to him, as though opening your hand is letting him slip away. [...] But when moments pass and crumble, they become seeds. They grow into new trees. And I promise you, he'll be in every new leaf. He will never be far from you. But if you don't let go of all that [he] did, you'll be haunted like the rest of them. You will miss the chance to live the life you want because you've accepted the one that's been passed down to you.”

“He’s become my best friend the way the others did: bit by bit, sand passing through an hourglass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back. He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray. I try not to love him. I really try.”

“I was a wound, half-healed-over and scraped raw again. "Everybody Hurts" was running through my mind. I could see the consolation of it, the idea that your pain wasn't unique. Something about that made it seem both bigger and smaller. Smaller because all the world was aching. Bigger because I could finally admit that every other feeling I'd been focusing on had been a distraction from the deepest hurt. My father was gone. And I would always miss him.”

“But somehow, I don't wind up on a tour of this soggy house. I wind up sitting in a cracked plastic Adirondack chair by the fire with Buck and -I think?- Chip and Lita-the-soon-to-be-rafting-guide, ranking Nicholas Cage movies by various criteria as the deep blues and purples of twilight melt into the deeper blues and blacks of night, the starry sky seeming to unfurl over us like a great, light-pricked blanket.”

“Then, suddenly, they're incredibly proud, but they're proud of the accomplishment, not of the work. So you feel like you have to keep accomplishing instead of just creating. It affirms the idea that the value in what you do is how people react to it, and not just the making of it. I've written stuff I'm really proud of that hardly anyone read. I've written stuff of I'm proud of that no one liked. That doesn't mean it didn't deserve to be written.”