“It was a beautiful night, warm and filled with stars and the songs of crickets and frogs. White flowers glowed in the grass. It was a night made for poetry. We should have been kissing. A lot.Instead we were sneaking out of the caves to a blood-soaked clearing where we’d been ambushed not twenty-four hours earlier. Not exactly an ordinary date.”

“I could hear the crickets and tree frogs starting their night song in the small, wooded area behind us. A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.”

“There were frogs all right, thousands of them. Their voices beat the night, they boomed and barked and croaked and rattled. They sang to the stars, to the waning moon, to the waving grasses. They bellowed long songs and challenges.”

“Where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.”

“We have the capacity to receive messages from the stars and the songs of the night winds.”

“You have grudged the very fire in your house because the wood cost overmuch!" he cried. "You have grudged life. To live cost overmuch, and you have refused to pay the price. Your life has been like a cabin where the fire is out and there are no blankets on the floor." He signaled to a slave to fill his glass, which he held aloft. "But I have lived. And I have been warm with life as you have never been warm. It is true, you shall live long. But the longest nights are the cold nights when a man shivers and lies awake. My nights have been short, but I have slept warm”