What makes a curse isn’t the words themselves, but the will bound to them, intention married to ink and tragedy.

Before the call buzzed in, Nedda wound her fingers in the small knot of hair at the back of Evgeni’s head. Light, scratchy – a warm steel-wool pad, but soft. She gave it a gentle tug. “See? I like you fine.” When Mission Control appeared on-screen, Evgeni was laughing. They said nothing about blindness. Nothing about energy spikes or which government made the swap from plutonium to strontium. The space between Earth and Chawla filled with all the things that could not be said.

Perhaps the book opened a door; books have a way of causing ripples.

His words are heavy with rare things: care and possibility.

Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.

I think sometimes it is difficult to look after ourselves,′ he said, thoughtfully. ‘We look to friends to do it for us.

She’d seen her father as a little boy, as an old man, and all the people in between, but none of those fathers were him. When sine crossed X, she knew him like she knew home, the cracks in the front porch steps she walked over every day, the creaky spot in the kitchen floor, how the living room smelled like all of them together. She knew him the way you know the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven, or the nap of a favorite blanket snuggled.

It’s brutal to realize that someone might find a life with you in it unbearable.

Amos did not listen; he was desperately tired of listening; he wished to speak.

People spend their entire lives moving back and forth over the same water, moving but staying.