Ridiculous, but better than feeling like you lived in some alternate universe where no one could hear you calling for help. Now it was like people could hear and just didn’t care. But wasn’t that progress?

I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.

To know that somebody was longing for you was the world’s strongest aphrodisiac.

If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple.

It helped that his accent contained a top hat and monocle.

There were probably too many exclamation points, but I couldn’t bear to erase them. I wanted to take shelter behind their manic enthusiasm, their idiotic sparkle.

If the house hadn’t been a mansion, if the death hadn’t been a suicide, if Violet Devohr’s dark, refined beauty hadn’t smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn’t have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can’t all afford to be ghosts.

And for what portion of human history had people even had desk jobs? Maybe the last four hundred years, out of four million? It wasn’t natural.

Someone had once told her that if a man sees the line of a woman’s suntan – the strip of white peeking out beneath the strap of her bathing suit or the collar of her dress – he’ll fall in love with her. Because he will believe he’s seen her truest self, raw and pale, something no other man knows. And this was the reason she’d fallen in love with George: She could see the desperate nerves beneath the bluster.

If everything else were still the same, he’d have felt Zee’s absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.