“As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.”

“I knelt by the fire to make certain there were no burning embers left. That was when I spied the tracks of a lion. There were only a few such beasts left in the desert, but one had come here, answering my call. He had been there all the while, watching over me, before he left me at last.”

“I know who you are in your heart,' Andres said. 'That's all that matters.' And that was it. That was the moment. Now I knew how I would feel if I ever lost him. That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do was imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.”

“He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.”

“The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet i was embittered, I wept for what i had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.”

“I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.”

“I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.”