“Ma, Kyle has the personality of a light switch. I don't have a crush on him. -Now, what exactly is that sentence supposed to mean? - I mean, he has two moods, and the presence of something that was created to go unnoticed throughout life. Like a light switch: on, off, there when you need it, forgettable when you don't.”

“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”

“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.”

“I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean's heavy, fishy aroma; it was a whiff of salt and mint, just as I approached the water on a dive, that warned me that a more powerful scent would soon enter my nose. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.”

“You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life.... These people no longer made progress.”

“I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”

“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...”