"It involved all of us—Mom, Daddy, Uncle Joley, Sam, even Hadley—but we all see it different ways. Me, I see it going backward. Like rewinding a movie. I don't know why I see it like this. I know, for example, that my mother doesn't." Prologue, p. 2.

"My job is to help children find their voices—kinds that come to school mute, or with lisps or cleft palates." Chapter 1, p. 4.

"I don't understand much about his work, but that is just as much my fault as Oliver's. He never tells me about the ideas burning in his mind anymore, and I sometimes forget to ask." Chapter 1, p. 5.

"But the humpbacks in Stellwagen Bank sing songs that fill you to the core, that swell inside you. They are the whales with which I fell in love when I first heard the calls—eerie, splayed...