“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.”

“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.”

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”

“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

“What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”