“Everyone has a story. I don't believer anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.”

“I have to believe in possibility. How else can we bear the enormous weight of life?”

“But maybe as I get older, I begin to see beauty where I least expected it before.”

“The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.”

“Sometimes -- she knows this from her own life -- to get to the other side, you must travel through grief. No detours are possible.”

“Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world.”

“Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.”