“Everyone has something of beauty about them. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look ...”

“Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.”

“In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.”

“If you love someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to s...”

“Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you cant fight your way out of as easily.”

“It's been so long since I've let myself feel anger that I don't just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though I'm gnawing through foilware.”

“Like blood out of a wound, a keening wail rose from the bottom of my heart and ripped through the graveyard. I lowered my face to Hadassah's shoulder and went quietly and thoroughly to pieces.”

“He appreciated all beautiful things. As she stood before him poised, scrutinizing every inch of his face, liable to strike him, he thought she was the most incredible thing he had seen in his life....”

“From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.”

“They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!”

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, warm, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturne...”

“For the rest of my life, Zanzibar will be the Swahili word for rain. The rain would drizzle, spit, mist, downpour, shower, torrent, gust, deluge and blast. At one point it hit the ground so hard it...”

“He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.”

“Wolves, and stars, and snow: Those things made sense.”

“The problem with the snow is that it sticks to everything it touches. You cant get rid of it. Even when it melts away, the chill still clings to your bones.”