“You don't give a gift to shape someone into the person you want him to be. You give a gift because it's something you couldn't bear to be without, but it's even more unthinkable for the other perso...”

“...she felt as if her entire body were glowing with the taste of sunlight, of wind blowing in wide spaces and trees reaching their burdened arms to boundless skies.”

“...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.”

“I watched you storm towards the restaurant door. It was a chilly December morning and the birds sitting on the high wires in the neighborhood refused to fly any longer.”

“There was warmth in his large piercing brown eyes. The kind of warmth that tucks a child into bed. The same kind of warmth that dries your wet hair on a rainy December afternoon.”

“It is December, and nobody asked if I was ready.”

“The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that th...”