“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”

“But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.”

“What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place.”

“In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”

“Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.”

“Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.”

“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.”