“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.”

“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ...”

“Life is but a dream for the dead.”

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

“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.”

“I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.”

“I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny...”

“No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight.”