"They worked together, the snow falling, almost wafting, down. And as my father moved, his adrenaline raced. He checked what he knew. Had anyone asked this man where he was the day I disappeared? Had anyone seen this man in the cornfield?" ─ FOUR, pp. 63.

"Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison steeped in. At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you." ─ FIVE, pp. 65.

"This was when she could think of me and she did so in two ways: she either thought Susie, just that one word, and cried there, letting her tears roll down her already damp cheeks, knowing no one could see her, no one would quantify this dangerous substance as grief, or she would imagine me running, imagine me getting away, imagine herself being taken instead, fighting until she was free. She fought back the constant question, Where is Susie now?" ─ FIVE, pp. 67.

"I thought I saw a long row of women standing on the window's walk and pointing my way. But a moment later, I saw differently. Crows were lined up, their beaks holding crooked twigs. As I stood to go back to the duplex, they took wing and followed me. Had my brother seen me somehow, or was he merely a little boy telling beautiful lies?" ─ SEVEN, pp. 108.

"He looked into the eyes of that photograph and saw right through them to the backdrop of marbleized suede every kid had to sit in front of under a hot light. What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It means lost, it means frozen, it means gone. He knew that no one ever really looked the way they did in photos." ─ NINE, pp. 126.

"He knew he didn't look as wild or as frightened as he did in his own. He came to realize something as he started at my photo─that it was not me. I was in the air around him, I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow, to set me free." ─ NINE, pp. 126.

"My neighbors and teachers, friends and family, circled an arbitrary spot far from where I'd been killed. My father, sister, and brother heard the singing again once they were outside. Everything in my father learned and pitched toward the warmth and light. He wanted so badly to have me remembered in the minds and hearts of everyone. I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of many little-girl-losts." ─ SIXTEEN, pp. 237.

"They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A hand-shake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from a distant window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child." ─ SIXTEEN, pp. 237.

"She had been remembering how the breeze in the hours before the storm had filled all the white gowns of graduating seniors as they stood outside Macy Hall. Everyone looked poised, for just a moment, to float away." ─ SEVENTEEN, pp. 264.

"It was Buckley, as my father and sister jointed the group and listened to Grandma Lynn's countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and started. He was drinking champagne. There were strings comming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held in his hands but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed─the hair still parted down the middle, the chest still flat and hips undeveloped─and wanted to call out my name. It was only a moment, and then I was gone." ─ SEVENTEEN, pp. 278.

"Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watched, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or bright smile when one of us had needed. And when I wasn't watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I'm afraid. A one-sided cajoling and coaching of the young, a one-way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never be signed." ─ SEVENTEEN, pp. 279.

" 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in he bottle depended, solely, on me." ─ SEVENTEEN, pp. 280.

"We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden moment that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space." ─ EIGHTTEEN, pp. 296.

"Little peeps and choked sob. But no amount of tears would sway buckley. He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four-year-old sat, his heart flashing. heart to stone, heart to stone." ─ NINETEEN, pp. 305.

"My father could see glimmers, like the colored flecks inside my mother's eyes─things to hold on to. These he counted among the broken planks and boards of a long-ago ship that had struck something greater than itself and sunk. There were only remnants and artifacts left to him now. He tried to reached up and touch her cheek, but his arm felt too weak. She moved closer and laid her cheek in his palm" ─ NINETEEN, pp. 306.

"I remembered once, with my parents and Lindley and Buckley, riding backward on a train into a dark tunnel. That was how it felt to leave Earth the second time. The destination somehow inevitable, the sights seen in passing so many times. But this time I was accompanied, not ripped away, and I knew we were taking a long trip to a place very far away." ─ TWENTY-TWO, pp. 353.

" 'I love you, Susie,' She said. I had heard these words so many times from my father that it shocked me now; I had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from my mother. She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply." ─ TWENTY-THREE, pp. 360.

"There were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections─sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent─that happned after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my lift." ─ TWENTY-THREE, pp. 363.