“I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.”

“It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that...”

“I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.”

“Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth.”

“My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.”

“I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.”

“Seek a slower, simpler life.”

“There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn't Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect sel...”

“Talking won't change it. But sometimes it was what she wanted most, to tell someone; often, though, she just wanted to escape those horrid feelings, to escape herself, so there was no pain, no fear...”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”

“I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.”

“I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know.”

“There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.”