“I have the most perfect belly button. When I stick my fingers in it, I feel a nerve in the center of my body shoot up my spine.”

“I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.”

“She (Annabeth) put her hand on my spine, and my skin tingled. I (Percy) moved her fingers to the one spot that grounded me to my mortal life. A thousand volts of electricity seemed to arc through my body.”

“My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.”

“I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself for the next hit, and feel something. Something grainy and small, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.”

“I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.”

“My first question [upon ascending to Heaven], believe it or not, will be, 'Did Adam and Eve have a belly button?' I don't know why, but that has bothered me for years.”

“When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.”

“Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine.”

“I perfectly feele even at my fingers end.”