“As a child, when I first heard the story of Creation, I’d closed my eyes and pictured the earth as a ball rolling off the palm of God and into dark space, then drifting around until it found its home in sunny orbit. Never perfect, but ever spinning, and holding on to her course, despite it all.”

“There is darkness on the water. There is darkness on the land. There is darkness all around us, but I will hold your hand. You are safe, my precious child. You are safe now, you are home. We have found you and we love you. You will never be alone.”

“My head was spinning. I felt like I’d been drifting, lost at sea all my life, and now that I’d found dry land, I couldn’t quite get my bearings.”

“Have you ever seen a child sitting on its mother’s knee listening to fairy stories? As long as the child is told of cruel giants and of the terrible suffering of beautiful princesses, it holds its head up and its eyes open; but if the mother begins to speak of happiness and sunshine, the little one closes its eyes and falls asleep with its head against her breast. . . . I am a child like that, too. Others may like stories of flowers and sunshine; but I choose the dark nights and sad destinies.”

“I love you,” she said softly.Jason's arms tightened around her. He grinned sleepily. “I know.”Taylor drifted off contentedly. Until through the darkness, she heard a low, sneaky whisper. “Mrs. Taylor Andrews . . .”She didn't bother to open her eyes.“Still not gonna happen.”

“Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles. Because we are all, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space. There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see. In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation. In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven’s greatest sonatas. And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun–itself a star on fire–when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass. All of these are miracles.”