“Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed.”

“To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive.”

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”

“What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?”

“But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.”

“Gates were creaking open inside him - paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more.”

“My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.”