“Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward.”

“All right, silent dark bear with angry frown, tell me more about your land.”He settled back down, picturing it. “I would tend to our land from the moment the sun rose to when it set and then you ...she would tend to me.”He laughed at her expression again. The world of exile camps and the Valley felt very far away, and he wanted to lie there forever.“Let me tell you about your bride,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows.“Both of you would cultivate the land. You would hold the plow, and she would walk alongside you with the ox, coaxing and singing it forward. A stick in her hand, of course, for she would need to keep both the ox and you in line.”“What would we...that is, my bride and I, grow?”“Wheat and barley.”“And marigolds.”Her nose crinkled questioningly.“I would pick them when they bloomed,” he said. “And when she called me home for supper, I’d place them in her hair and the contrast would take my breath away.”“How would she call you? From your cottage? Would she bellow, ‘Finnikin!’?”“I’d teach her the whistle. One for day and one for night.”“Ah, the whistle, of course. I’d forgotten the whistle.”

“What do you know about life? " Bitterness ached in her throat. " You were born with everything. You never had to struggle for a single thing you wanted, never had to worry if you'd be accepted or loved or wanted back." He stared at her, grateful for the moment that she couldn't see that he'd spent nearly half of his life worrying that she, the single thing he wanted, would accept him, love him, and want him back.”

“He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.”

“Her fingers dug into the doorframe she leaned on, hoping and praying that he would just step out of the shadows and kiss her the way he had done so often in her dreams.”

“It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by it's name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God God, God." That's God, you know.”