“Because we love pie, Kirsten and I always celebrate Pi Day: March 14 (3.14). But because 3.14 could also designate all of March 2014, and because Pie Month happens only once every hundred years, I decided we should have pie every day that month.”

"No one has ever felt passionately about a gallon of milk."

"It is as intimate an experience as one can have, to be skin-to-skin with someone. The importance of touch continues into our adult lives, too, where handshakes, pats on the back, and hugs keep us grounded with other people."

"It's 3:30 in the morning. I've been in Edinburgh for less than twenty-four hours, and I am still trying to recover from the jetlag, so I’ve come down to the hostel's common area to get a snack and do some writing."

"I awoke one night in a terror; the house’s shadows trembled as a train passed by and an engineer with no mercy yanked the whistle cord, producing one long scream in the night."

"Looking over a garden—whether fresh tilled dirt with seeds yet to germinate or in the height of production, or a plot of sun-withered vines—I find it easy to believe in pagan deities of fertility and death."

"In Mormondom, we do not “say grace.” Instead, we “say the prayer” or, more commonly in my parents’ house, “bless the food.” If you arrive late to a Mormon dinner party, your host or hostess will likely excuse you from the ritual of praying. “Eat up,” they will say. “The food has already been blessed.”

"We’ve traded moving boxes for haphazard piles. There are empty CD jewel cases, business envelopes, a journal, the Bluetooth keyboard for Kirsten’s iPad, a picture of my mother, scissors, old travel maps from cities we’ve never been to, a notebook, utility bills."

"On paper, this was the top school in the country, which is why officials had brought us foreigners here, to make these students the best. To make their school appear to be the best."

"I suppose people might think it’s creepy to look through strangers’ Facebook profiles and glimpse the tidbits they have given the world, but I enjoy it."

"I lost the first draft of this essay. No joke. Given the nature of this essay, I am pleased that it worked out this way; it’s perfect, really, that I should lose an essay about losing things."

"Souvenir, literally “memory,” or “to come to mind.” And what was she to remember from the gifts I could buy?"

"I dislike the request “Tell me a story.” I don’t know if this is something people like asking their writer friends, or if I'm just surrounded by people who like a good story, but I do not like the request. When I am asked for a story I freeze up, go blank; things get awkward quickly. I am not a storyteller."

"Ironic, that nothing should be a noun. A noun, the colloquial definition goes, is a person, place, or thing. Nothing certainly is neither a person nor a place. It is definitely and definitively not a thing, except, of course, grammatically."