“I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.”

“These branches will be my bones, I thought, and the paper will be my heart and skin, the places that feel everything.”

“If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse.”

“Hey now, none of that. You know I don't have one evil bone in my body."Only two hundred and six of them?”

“I feel you in my bones. You're knocking at my windows. You're slow to letting me go. And I know this feeling, This feeling in my bones.”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”