“The room had the impersonal, disconnected feel of a waiting room on Jupiter.”

“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.”

“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 discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same.”

“I heard silence, silence infinite as the bottom of the ocean, a silence that sealed.”

“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.”

“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.”