“Marina Singh: "You went to Radcliffe."Annick Swenson: "I didn't love it.”

“Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell.She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of the insect, which was doubtlessly already burrowed into the skin with some entomological protuberance, straight into the bloodstream.”

“...writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling.”

“Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.”

“...And there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken.”

“He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.”

“Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.”