Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

"Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to."

"We have lunch at ten-forty-five,” Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period."

"She's called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school."

"[she used to say that] each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world – like a bride wears on her wedding day—except this kind of veil is invisible. we walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. the world is kind of blurry. we like it that way. but sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments – like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces – and when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. we see all the beauty and cruelty and sadness and love, but mostly we are happy not to. some people learn to lift the veils themselves. then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. ...it’s just her way of saying that most of the time people get distracted by little stuff, and ignore the big stuff."

"What's the burn scale?"

"And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love."

"Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.' 'In the way of what' 'In the way of what's true."

"Didn't you ever have a father yourself? You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.' So I figured it's because I never had a father that I don't want one now. A person can't miss something she never had."

"Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud."