Quotes in italics appear in the book, but are attributed to someone other than the author.

"Maybe life was just a series of phases— one phase after another." (16)

"I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?" (19)

"'I'm just more Mexican,' I said. 'Mexicans are a tragic people.'

'Maybe so,' he said.

'You're the optimistic American.'

'Is that an insult?'

'It might be,' I said." (20)

"I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get— and never would get." (29)

"Words were different when they lived inside of you." (31)

"Something happened inside me as I looked out into the vast universe. Through that telescope, the world was closer and larger than I'd ever imagined. And it was all so beautiful and overwhelming and— I don't know— it made me aware that there was something inside of me that mattered." (42)

"Different boys lived by different rules." (55)

"I thought of Dante and and wondered about him.

And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness.

Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?" (56)

"I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did." (74-75)

"I knew I wasn't a boy anymore. But I still felt like a boy. Sort of. But there were other things I  was starting to feel. Man things, I guess. Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness. And I didn't want to be treated like a boy anymore. I didn't want to live in my parents' world and I didn't have a world of my own. In a strange way, my friendship with Dante made me feel even more alone.

Maybe it was because Dante seemed to make himself fit everywhere he went. And me, I always felt that I didn't belong anywhere. I didn't even belong in my own body— especially in my own body. I was changing into someone I didn't know. The change hurt but I didn't know why it hurt. And nothing about my emotions made sense. (81)

"'Smiles are like that. They come and go.'" (147)

"Sometimes, all you have to do is tell people the truth. They won't believe you. After that, they'll leave you alone." (160)

"The problem with tryin hard not to think about something was that you thought  about it even more." (167)

"Sometimes I think that I don't let myself know what I'm really thinking about. That doesn't make much sense, but it makes sense to me. I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about— and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are." (178)

"It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that that wasn't totally true. The Ari I used didn't exist anymore.

And the Ari I was becoming? He didn't exist yet." (189)

"I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe. (235)

"I was in love with the innocence of dogs, the purity of their affection. They didn't know enough to hide their feelings. They existed. A dog was a dog. There was such a simple elegance about being a dog that I envied." (240)

"He looked so happy and I wondered about that, his capacity for happiness. Where did that come from? Did I have that kind of happiness inside me? Was I just afraid of it?" (241)

"I had something of value— even if it was just a truck that brought out a sweet nostalgia in people. It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep that photograph forever." (246)

"One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds." (261)

"What did words matter to a desert?" (281)

"I opened the back window and smelled the rain. You could smell the rain in the desert before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought. I felt another drop and then another. A kiss. A kiss. And then another kiss. I thought about the dreams I'd been having— all of them about kissing." (293)

 "Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for." —W.S. Merwin (295)

" Everyone was always becoming someone else.

Sometimes when you were older, you became younger. And me, I felt old. How can a guy that's about to turn seventeen feel old?" (300)

"I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from  their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the forst human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them many things and yet I didn't have the words." (308-309)

"The bruises would heal on their own. At lease the ones on the outside. 

No swimming. He couldn't do much, really. He could lie around. But Dante like lying around. That was the good thing.

He was different. Sadder.

The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.

I knew that a part of him would never be the same.

They cracked more than his ribs." (325)

"I sat up on my bed and ran my fingers over the scars on my legs. Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed.

Had I been hurt?

Had I healed?

Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing." (335)

"This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I always fought them without even knowing it." (358)